Archaeology Online: archaeology and recovery of military personnel

Join us in our next Archaeology Online and find out how the award-winning Operation Nightingale uses archaeology to aid recovery.

Operation Nightingale is a military initiative which uses archaeology as a mechanism of recovery for military personnel injured in conflict. The programme was established in 2011 and is still running today. Several hundred military personnel have now taken part in the project, and have helped to record, investigate and excavate archaeological sites across the Salisbury Plain, one of the richest archaeological landscapes in Britain with 6000-year-old settlement and burial sites to 20th-century military remains.

This lecture will explore the success of the Operation Nightingale programme and look in detail at some of their most recent archaeological sites . We will move from the prison hulks around Portsmouth to the tanks of the Western Front, meet the men of the Band of Brothers’ and a Visigoth on Salisbury Plain

Speaker: Richard Osgood is the Senior Archaeologist for Defence Infrastructure Organisation (Ministry of Defence). Richard and his team look after around 770 Scheduled Monuments, parts of 10 World Heritage Sites, and other historical sites owned by the MOD. He is the co-founder of Operation Nightingale, Current Archaeology’s Archaeologist of the Year in 2019 and has recently been awarded an MBE in recognition of his work.