Dr Gilly Carr, Senior Lecturer and Academic Director in Archaeology at the Institute of Continuing Education, and Principal Investigator on the grant, has been awarded a British Academy grant in collaboration with Professor Marek Jasinski of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.
The project, ‘A tale of two camps’, will enable excavations to take place in 2015 at a WWII forced labour camp in Jersey (Lager Wick) and a prison camp in Norway (SS-Strafgefangenenlager Falstad). The project asks what archaeology can contribute to knowledge lost, buried or deliberately destroyed regarding Nazi camps, and seeks to discover what we can add to what we already know about the everyday lives of those interned.
Both Carr and Jasinski hope that their work will raise the profile of the heritage value of such sites, many of which have been lost since the war. A pilot excavation was carried out at both sites in 2014 with promising results, and now, on the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, the time is right for full-scale excavations.
"The 2014 trial excavations were very exciting", says Gilly Carr. "The excavations in Jersey focused on the area of some of the former barrack blocks of the camp, and revealed the presence of building materials and barbed wire. Although the camp was razed to the ground with nothing left to see, it was interesting to see what still survived.
"The ability of archaeology to reveal Nazi crimes is very satisfying. Our excavations at Falstad prison camp focused on the camp’s rubbish pits. Over 1,000 items were found in five days, revealing the everyday life of prisoners at the site. My favourite artefacts included the meal dish of a prisoner, complete with his initials scratched into the side, and a set of bars which fitted over a nearby window from the main building of the camp, a building which still survives today as the education centre.
"I feel tremendously privileged to be involved in such cutting edge archaeology at these important sites and I look forward to passing on the results of fieldwork to my students next year in my Conflict Archaeology course for Diploma students. Archaeology has such an important role to play in raising awareness about, and revealing, hidden or destroyed pasts. These excavations and others like them mean that our source of knowledge about Nazi camps will not disappear with the passing of the last former inmates. In this anniversary year, such work has an added poignancy."
Excavations in Jersey will begin at the end of March 2015 and those in Norway will take place during the summer.
Lager Wick project website
Lager Wick excavation blog
Falstad excavation blog