Tony Pollard (archaeologist)

Tony Pollard (born 1965) is an archaeologist specialising in the archaeology of conflict. He is Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University.[1] He is the co-presenter of the BBC series Two Men in a Trench, co-founder of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, and guest expert on Time Team.

This article is about the archaeologist. For the American football player, see Tony Pollard (American football).

Early life

Tony Pollard was born in Macclesfield in the north of England in 1965, though he moved to Oban on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1970s. He studied archaeology at Glasgow University and after graduating stayed on to do a PhD on prehistoric hunter gatherers.

Career

After obtaining his PhD in 1995 he spent two years living in Brighton while working for the field archaeology unit of University College London. In 1997 he returned to work for Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD). Following a first visit to South Africa in 1999, he carried out a project investigating battlefields from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. In 2000, he co-organised, with Phil Freeman of Liverpool University, the first ever international conference on battlefield archaeology. He then went on to make two series of Two Men in a Trench with Neil Oliver which introduced the public to the archaeology of British battlefields.

The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology was founded in 2006 and Pollard appointed its director.[2] Since then the centre has gone on to offer the world's first post-graduate course in battlefield and conflict archaeology, while also publishing the Journal of Conflict Archaeology. The centre has carried out various projects which include the examination of Jacobite battlefields in Scotland (including Culloden) and most recently the investigation of British and Australian mass graves from World War I at Fromelles in France.

Writing

Pollard has written numerous papers and articles on archaeology (eg. as editor of Journal of Conflict Archaeology) and military history and edited several books on subjects as diverse as the early prehistory of Scotland and the archaeology of death. Along with Neil Oliver he wrote the two books accompanying the Two Men in a Trench programmes.[3] In 2008, his first novel, The Minutes of the Lazarus Club, a thriller based on the life of the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was published by Michael Joseph.[4] It was republished in 2009 by Penguin under the title of The Secrets of the Lazarus Club.[5]

References
  1. "Centre for Battlefield Archaeology Staff Profiles". Retrieved 20 October 2011.
  2. "University of Glasgow – Research – Research units A‑Z – Centre for Battlefield Archaeology". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 9 April 2019.
  3. Pollard, Tony; Oliver, Neil (2003). Two Men in a Trench II: Uncovering the Secrets of British Battlefields. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-4594-1.
  4. "Book review: The Minutes of the Lazarus Club by Tony Pollard". www.scotsman.com. Retrieved 14 May 2017.
  5. Pollard, Tony (27 August 2009). The Secrets of the Lazarus Club. Penguin Adult. ISBN 9780141035895. Retrieved 14 May 2017.


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