 So I normally expect to look in the audience and see that the Don McCullen thousand-yard stair. So you can see that stuff is a small clip of one particular incident in Songin where the group of soldiers under siege and I defy anyone to go through anything like that without being deeply affected. The genesis of this project came as a result of a phone call. It's one of these things that a lot of these ideas emerge purely by opportunity and chance, right place at the right time. I had a phone call from the Sergeant Medic at One Rifles over at B.C. Barracks, over in Chepstow, who happened to have an archaeology degree and he rang me and said we've got a soldier who's been off work for the best part of a couple of years and we are running out of ideas as to what we can do with him. He has to be a time team nut. Can we organise some archaeology for him in an agreement of chaps from One Rifle's first battalion just to get out onto one of their training areas and do something very, very different. And that's how the project started. It perhaps shouldn't be a surprise that eventually we've achieved quite a bit of success because a lot of the archaeological techniques we've got in British archaeology, as you know, have emerged from a military sphere and many of the great names in British archaeology have come from a military background or have gone into a military background. That's sure. If you look up and down the stairs here and see the photographs of the great and the good, many of them will have been from a military background, probably the thing you shouldn't do with the power point in naming left to right, then you probably all can tell Lieutenant General Pitt Revers, Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler, OGS Crawford, who of course developed his aerial photographic techniques in his days at the Royal Flying Corps before we joined the Ordnance Survey. And with Leonard Woolley over on the right, T.E. Lawrence, who of course matched with the Crusader Cards. And so there are all these great links to archaeology from the military and across. You can also think of the development of aerial photo photography, of metal detecting, all sorts of different pieces that join in with archaeology and military spheres. The first phase we did with soldiers was to get them into the idea of doing something very different, doing some archaeology, because lots of these chapter left school of 16, lots of them weren't ever told that they could do anything academic, and they probably in many cases not experienced anything other than soldiering. So this was a very, very different thing for them to do. They experienced soldiering, but perhaps not in a way of reverence as I have as an archaeologist. So the first thing we do with a lot of these projects is to inculcate them into the ideas of cultural heritage. We start with maybe a trip to the centre of Stonehenge, or in this case we went to the Iron Age village of Butser, where we had them all going around looking at Iron Age elements they might experience it on the Iron Age sites we worked on. And of course they tried to hand the pottery, at the end of which I think I ended up with 25 ashtrays. Apart from this one where Rifleman Burnie put a lot of work into a replica Iron Age pot. And then the other side, because I always show Wayne the soldier there, the image of him with all his tattoos and comparing with the Pasaric tattoos over in Siberia, there's this very nice link of tattooed warriors who want to do better work, time in memorial. So they experience something very different throughout in the open air, and then we take them to an archaeological site and undertake some field work. With all the projects that we've worked on, we make sure that there's a very genuine work reason for it. So I don't want to do job creation for these chaps, and I also don't want them on a site that they're going to do something that need to be done. We focus on things like heritage at risk, because a site that needs something doing to it, to scrub clearance or recording, but I don't have the capacity within my day job to do that, these chaps are the ideal solution. If we have a site where the scheduling is very ropey, to say the least, with the scheduling on clearance, we can then undertake a certain amount of limited evaluation to define the scheduling a little bit better. We also try and improve some techniques of excavation as I'll come to a little bit later, but there has to be a genuine work reason for this. So the first site we worked on, for those of you that know of the site we play, is the East Chisumbry Midden. It's a collection of feasting debris about three metres in depth, covering several hectares to the north of the military training area, takes to about 700 BC, so that costs between the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. It's one of these sites that, when you normally take school visitors over sites on Salty Plain, you encourage the children to kick over molehills to see if they can find a piece of pottery. If you did that in the midden, you'd break your ankle, because there is that much material coming out, burnt flints, animal bone, the odd piece of human bone, and huge chunks of pottery. The first stage we did with these jabs was to get them looking at the material coming out, but it's not a scheduled monument. The main ravage is, as you've probably, and you'll never talk to an emoji archaeologist without them rattling on about badges on the parade, so I'm going to meet in stereo time. The biggest threats of monuments on Salty Plain are borrowing animals, rabbits and badges. The midden is heavily affected by badges who are turfing out great volumes of archaeological deposits which are just lying on the surface. I thought it would have been an ideal opportunity to get these individuals to plot, map all the information, to learn using GPS and total stations, surveying equipment, skills that they can reuse if they have to go back into the army, to record the finds, the mark the finds, the wash the finds, and to do some desk space research as well. So, material that's already out of context, but nonetheless would get these extra information. Also, could they develop patterns of occupation and use of the middens, big area, where different activities are going on in different areas? So, you can see the individuals here going through badger spoil. Weigelman sing on the right holding up an Iron Age shirt. He was interviewed by the press about his feelings on the exhibition project and its merit or otherwise, and they asked him about what he'd enjoyed, and he said to be the first person to touch this piece of pottery in 2,700 years, they taught fingerprints on it as well. And he had that real resonance that we have as archaeologists connecting with one's ancestors with the past, simply by seeing those fingerprints of the potter that had made it in the early Iron Age. So, he was thrilled with that. We got them plotting every single find that they were getting from the midden, using find tags to start with, and then plotting with the surveying equipment that was provided by one of the engineering squadrons who were also getting a benefit from this because they normally have to survey their car park over and over again. So, doing something very different was a good skill set for them, and we tried to roll out within the Ministry of Defence where we can bring them in to use their laser scanning skills in a different capacity. We taught them also to draw sections, to draw plans. Skills of surveying are very useful from an army perspective. So, one of the things we've kept in our minds is that they've got to develop skills within this project, but if they're retained as riflemen, they're able to use that knowledge which is part of their day job. They leave, it's a skill set, or hopefully a passion for archaeology at a new hobby that they can utilise in the city street. We started by plotting each individual find until we found out that really doing that best part of 8,000 shares of pottery in a week is a very problematic methodology. So, we taught them the way that you can adapt your research strategy through a process of explanation. The sorts of finds we had here were rather nice unaged bowls. We've got all cannings, pottery bowls. We've got floured necks, vessels, a lot of animal bone. The sheep, the sheep form the largest cordial assemblage component. Things like bone walls, some decorative pieces. The image in the bottom left, we have no idea what it is. Decorative fitting, we referred to it as, three of those. And then one very small area we had, I think it was 13 spindle wells. When sheep are the dominant cordial assemblage, to get a lot of their weaving equipment was quite interesting. We had a bit of a competition going on. One of the things you find when you mix various battalions together is that they become very competitive about what they find. So, first battalion is better than third. Sixth battalion at the best. So, very competitive. In this case, we had interranked rivalry because we had a sergeant up against the Lance Corporal. The Lance Corporal found 13 spindle wells. Sergeant next to him found absolutely nothing. So, by the end of the day, he was lucky he wasn't on a charge being the lower rank. Anyway, a large amount of material from spoil taken out by badges, which otherwise had gone completely unrecorded. So, for me, that was the result. At the moment, all this material is a peachy barracks in Chepstow, where they're experiencing the joy of fines washing. This was the chap that was put in charge of this. The young rifleman, the rifleman being the lowest rank in the regiment. My first met him. He was a very, very quiet individual, in a very, very special place. By the end of the week, he couldn't shut him up. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe that wasn't a good thing. But he was very protective about his environment. This was definitely his domain, the fine drum. So much so that when we had the squadron of the British Army, General Parker turning up, he got barred from the fine's tent while I was rifleman. General rifleman. Nonetheless, this rifleman had taken complete control and had organized his material. He'd taken the initiative of procuring lots of old excavation reports dealing with all cannings cross pottery, or late bronze early iron age pottery. So he was really developing that sort of desk-based skill that's fantastic for archaeologists. And he had it all very, very well organized, almost too organized. The project then moved from there to another site over in Wales. This is very close to the barracks of the first battalion of the rifles over in Shepster. This is on the defence training estate at Carwent. You'll notice we've given them all exercise names. This is the way we can book them onto the military training training authorities to say, this is a unit specifically booking these sets of training features. So exercise miles, this is a Roman site at the defence training estate at Carwent. As you probably all know, Carwent is a very, very big Roman town and you have a lot of Roman military elements. The site itself within the training area was horribly overgrown with trees and weeds. Although Caddo don't have a heritage and risk list, I'm sure that if they did, this potentially would have gone on to it. So the first stage of the operation was to use strimmers and chainsaws to clear up a large area. And even if we'd done nothing else, the site would have been hugely improved as a result of that. As with many of the sites on the Ministry of Defence they've been looked at in the past by antiprees with not a great deal of recording, it has to be said. The records for this site were simply a letter from one of the participants to the excavator so 30 years on, say, I do remember our lovely summer at Carwent, you know, for the HDR, I think we'll agree. The scheduling of this site was simply a large duke around a large oval, sorry, it should be a large oval set on top of the map, that's the scheduled area. So what the CHAPS did was to undertake geophysical survey along with one of the geophysicists at Craftville, the Ministry of Academy, and after that, what they did was to re-excavate the antiprees trenches to record the section that had never been recorded and to recover any material that had been missed. In so doing, they uncovered a really rather wonderful and very large Roman building, including very large laid ash blocks, pipe course system, and in the spoil left by the antiprees, I think they found about 20 Roman coins, including this rather special gate, which is quite nice in the Euclid Pair of the sort of military gatehouse that they've got there on site for their military guard service, so it's that nice connection. We find that they're getting as many connections for the soldiers as possible to keep to the gauge, so very, very successful piece of work. Now, maybe from the sublime to the ridiculous, the next site we worked on goes back to that idea of trying to improve techniques, and I know that many of you that work in archeology or follow archeology will know that English heritage at the moment are trying to revamp their guidance, though, as to what one should do in recovering modern archeology, 20th century archeology, and that relating to the Second World War. What you may not know is that the heritage statute connected with things like this aircraft site is owned by the Ministry of Defense and the Protection and Military Remains Act was issued in 1986. Every single crashed aircraft from the Second World War and many named wrecks are covered by this act, therefore you can't simply go out into the field with a large JCB and dig a hole. Partly because you dig up a bomber, you may not have dug it up after it's come back from suspicion of Germany, and therefore it may still have the bottoms on board. That's the same reason you don't want to dig it as you don't want to metal a technical soldier to complain. It's a very good reason for it. It's liable to get banged. So the statute is organized, but licenses are issued to individuals that want to recover crash site elements for a specific purpose, up for commemoration, or for including material within a specific museum, for example. For the most part, that's simply been a recovery operation. What we wanted to do as part of Operation Nightingale was to try to change techniques whereby you brought a more archaeological perspective to that work and recovered it using more traditional archaeological techniques. You're still using a JCB, which you'll see on archaeological sites anyway, where you want to plot finds, to have information derived from the work you're undertaking, to draw some sections, and to get the most information you possibly can about the story of the last moments of this airframe. In this instance, this was a sterling bomber that crashed in Lergo-Shall in Sussex. It was a victim of friendly fire brought down by a British aircraft, and it crashed at about 80 degrees, the horizontal, straight down and nosing down into the ground, but that's information we were able to derive from measuring and drawing sections of the engines and such like from the roof of the ground. And you can see two right-wing women here recording the material that they're excavating and plotting it in surveys so that we're able to produce a scatterplot relating to the sterling, as you can see over there on the left. Another interesting dynamic here is having military people excavating the military site because you have all the ethos connectors there, of people from the military background fully understanding the heritage port into the site like this, because effectively these are their forebears, their ancestors. One of the interesting elements we found from one of the chaps was that he'd been a machine gunner for the platoon out in Afghanistan, and he found that one small round case, a 303 case from the crash site. And he picked this thing up and he was mulling over it so it was a really venerated object. I asked him why he was looking specifically at this one particular piece of metal, and he said to me, what you can tell from this is the gunner has thought he's got home safely before he was shot down, because the round has been pushed into the gun, the chain hood, and then he's extracted it as you do when you unload the guns when you're home. It's at that point that the aircraft's been hit and he was only able to tell that because he was, that was his day job, he was a machine gunner. He could tell all that from the little scratches on the edges of the round case, which is a very powerful little art, in fact, frankly, it's a moment of hope for the crewman just before he's hit. So that was a very poignant element of that piece of work. It's not all field work with this project, what we're trying to do is to build up partnerships with external companies to get these individuals into professional organisations to continue their there and learning, development and getting different skills. So doing presentations, such as Dave's doing with me today, or learning writing skills to write up the reports of what they've done. Lots of professional companies have been very good with their time and volunteering places for these people to go on two week placements. We always have two individuals together, so they're buddying up and they're all on their own. This is one example of Westex Archaeology where two riflemen are learning to do finds recording, to draw the finds that they've made. And also to do some paleo pathology. One of the individuals you see here actually has to deal with that thing. That sort of side of things, when he goes in theatre and they come across human remains, it's being able to do an initial forensic job. So for him, a very important piece of work. Can't it be archaeological trust? All sorts of places and they were good enough to put up about 12 riflemen who worked on the Roman sites. The Star Fine being this rather lovely in Tavio on the right of the Roman gemstone, which was found by Corporal Steve Winston, the rifleman. So for him, that's his archaeological career finished because he's never gonna find anything ever as good as that. And they've worked alongside groups such as the Church's Conservation Trust as part of their heritage lottery funded survey of this church down in Portland. And the soldiers worked alongside other volunteers using the tocal station to record the graveyard and the church itself. I mentioned heritage of risk, which we have much too much on the MODS state for my liking, but we're bringing it down. One of the sites we've got out at Otterburn, you know, a place called Buckle Hill, actually, in Warcock, is a collection of Coffin Ringmark stones. And the reason they're on the heritage of risk list is because they get eroded through rain. Really, that's an act of God. Not a lot we can do in the ministry to talk about that. But one of the things we could do is to illustrate to the inspectors of monuments that we are recording these things and getting an empirical data set together to monitor any erosion effects. And thereby, we are doing the best by the monuments and hopefully we'll get it off the risk list. Perhaps we might cover it with the turf that you can see locally, or we will just simply continue the monitoring process. But as I said to you before, the engineers involved in the project have this skill. They're able to use laser scanners, bringing that kit in that they're usually used in theatre, but they can also equally apply it to an archaeological technique. So it's not surveying the car park, but it serves an actual proper purpose within heritage protection regimes that will save the taxpayers some money. The biggest excavation we've worked on so far, and the project's only been running since September last year, so it's still in fairly early days, been going for about a year, was what we call exercise bale wolf. This is the excavation of a Bronze Age round barrow, which is also the main residence of a large number of badgers, and also the place of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. I would get regular phone calls from my partner company saying, there's been some human bone on the surface, I'm not sure what we should do about it, but it's something that's untenable for me as an archaeologist to have curatorially to have a site with human remains lying on the surface. We've tried to exclude badgers from the site with badge-approved fencing. Badgers outwit me every time, so I'm never going to win that one, especially as there's some local person that keeps cutting the fence and cutting the back in. So a pragmatic decision was made on consultation with English heritage, is that we would actually excavate the site. It's a site about probably about five miles north of Stonehenge, outside the word heritage site, but nonetheless very important, and it was looked at in the 19th century by Colonel William Hawley, also as you probably know, at Stonehenge, his records were pretty much on a pile with the chap who had sent the letter and car went. He even admitted to his records that he hadn't been hit before. So we decided we would investigate this site, get all the archaeological material and take it away from being at risk. For this point, I'm going to hand over to a participant of the project so he can tell you all about what we did. Thank you Richard. As I've been introduced, I'm David Hart, I'm a former Lance Corporal with six rifles, which was one of the T.A. battalions, which was formed on the formation of the rifle in 2007. So having been a bit of a mudblood myself as being not quite civilian, not quite soldier somewhere in between, I was really keen to sort of do my part and I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2003. Unfortunately, I was injured in January of 2004 in a vehicle-borne suicide attack, which resulted in the death of a comrade and injuries for myself and several other colleagues. So the big question for me is what to do, really. My civilian life as I knew it had changed, so I reckoned with people and couldn't go back to my day job as a forklift driver for a brewery. So I turned to education and went on to do a degree. And yeah, I fought to go on and myself for optical politics and history rather than archeology. So a sort of fast forward, really, eight years. I was in the final throes of a PGC in July, so I'm now a fully qualified primary teacher for my sins. And I had an email from the rifles who cared for casualties with their publications there. And just coming under the umbrella of the rifles for six months before I was medically discharged, I was lucky enough to be a recipient for one of their care grants. If you paid more tuition, please. What I also received that week, though, was an email telling me about this operation night ago. Now I saw the word archeology straight away, and my ears bricked up, and I was quite keen to see what this was about. But having been out for some five years, I assumed that might be a few problems here. But again, I got a phone call and I was welcomed up to the site. Unfortunately, because of my course ending when it did, I was only able to go for the last three weeks exercise available up in the club, which, for me, was great because I considered that the glory weeks because that's when all the fines were happening. Unfortunately, first of the four rifle's lads had essentially gone up and dug holes. I think, yeah, the only shoppification I had, really, was when I spoke on the phone and said, so you ought to go and sell as you play in big holes for three weeks. So having done that before, my one question was, do I have to sleep in them? So which answer was, no, so I was like, right, I'm all in. And for rather selfish reasons as well, the thing that I specialised in humanities, Anglo-Saxons is currently on the curriculum, it was a real dead spot for me in my knowledge, so I figured, do you know what the kids won't appreciate is me sort of bumbling my way through my knowledge being not what it is, but I can amaze you with the Anglo-Saxons skeleton that I dug up. Yeah, having come onto the site quite late, I, you know, straight away, my sort of trepidation was stripped away, that's quite scary for me, how easily I slipped back into the sporty skin, you know. There I was, having been reintroduced to society and come for all the tests, I'm normal human being, again. I quickly found I slept into my sporty skin, and it was great, as I previously mentioned, not feeling fully alive on them because I was only there for seven months wearing that cat badge, to integrate with guys from the other battalions, it was that real kind of rightful family thing, and that's E-boster, the wife of the striped horse, it's their formation, and that felt really good. But more importantly, the chastity is my priority. Straight away, I had a look around the site and was amazed, you know, it was double-taping some of the skeleton, especially this piece on the right, that right in the Kendrick was working, if you look to the left of the skull there, you can see this picture there, having been cleaned up and preserved. This was an Iron Age vessel, it was kind of star-finder at that point, bearing in mind that guys are getting one of the Barzai, you know, this case of the Chateau lunch was, I'll find another shoe boss today. You know, it was not waste on us, really, that we were exceptionally lucky to be given a chance to ask guys like this. And for me, at the first time, you know, I felt that most of the guys, having done one or two dates, were pretty much professional. I suppose the benefits, for me, as I've explained, they were great, but speaking to other guys, some of the junior life men, they were, you know, equally as scared about the fact that you know, going to Seoul has been a big event, but, you know, their reticence to do it was, you know, it seemed to disappear in the instant. And for me, it was hard to distinguish, perhaps, apart from the uniforms and the t-shirts, who were the archaeological students, who were their soldiers. There were some particularly good finds, up on the left hand, who were there, was a road shop, I think, Gilded. And yeah, that was the pretending that I know what I'm doing. Unfortunately for me, I seem to end up on the grade cuts with no finds there. But, you know, I was saving myself, you know, right from the Kendrick of his bucket, in the Corbatonson with our Corbin Richardson, with his find as well. So, you know, it came to a bit of a well-offmanship on the run Italian, which Italian I found what, but I was quite happy to learn to record an opening walk, being quite a king to get back to basics. And I felt as an infant here, it really came to that, I almost took a moment, I thought, well, actually, in 30 years, I spent around the uniform as an infant here. My bread and butter, as it were, was to know the ground, to appreciate the ground, and to assess it. And some of these skills came back to me really well, and I was quite surprised by myself, you know. I was looking with a quite informed eye, well, can I surely transfer these skills to our people? Again, that's something that's a bit of a work in progress, but I was quite happy to start where I did, and I think actually coming from a site like Paraclum, I was exceptionally spoiled. Richard included, and Dan at Walsh, and the who are either side of the award there, to essentially invent a category so that they can offer, give an award to Operation Nightingale for all its work, which I think is a great accolade, and especially when you think that Operation Nightingale has only been going for just about 12 months, it's not, actually. All these sponsors and supporters have been able to make Operation Nightingale a feasible thing to do. And I think actually the benefits that everyone that I've spoken to and I myself have got out of the project so far, are un-told really. And I think, again, it's kind of giving soldiers a focus. There's certainly, we're all quite aware that potentially after 2014, not all that much, I'd say that there was a, I'd say we did spoil David, now I know you've done up the glory, which you're on the site stripping next year. The fact is we've run 27 over Saxon skeletons, the cremation, the skeletons were sixth century in date. A mixture of males, females, and children with some wonderful grade goods. Dave mentioned that the shield bosses, we had three shield bosses, I think we had five spears, some bladed weapons, lots of beautiful brooches and beads. Now, if you try and put a right from the body with brooches and beads, instead of one with drinking vessels, spears, shields, you're on a loser. You've got that warrior to warrior connection ethos again, and yes, you're never going to succeed with that. Critical thing for us is to give these young men a good experience. We've chosen sites that will have rich archeology because that's important, none of them want to dig, bronze age linear ditches, which are just gonna be digging chalk as they've done that as well. For giving them sites in the open air, once good company with fresh rations, and you have to credit Kepercash, who's huge, he provided us with enough money to look at the leaflets to be able to get fresh rations for them, and to be in the open air, and for them to be able to discuss their experiences in a kinship group that perhaps they've never been able to do that before. Now, as Dave said, archeology may not be the solution for that, but maybe at the start of opening their eyes, that they have skill sets, they have transferable abilities, arms up, they may go to archeology, you've got at least three of them doing archeology degrees at Leicester, having left school at 16 with no GCSEs and archaic degrees, so for them, archeology is certainly a means to an end, and they can see that there is a future for them, whether they stay in the army or that they have to leave. Perhaps the most powerful thing in closing is one of the statements from one of the young drivers, at the end of one of the, if nothing else, if archeology as a discipline is able to give somebody