Prof Nicholas Saunders

Conflict archaeologist, anthropologist and historian

Professor Nicholas Saunders is in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at Bristol University. His research focuses on the archaeology and anthropology of landscape, material culture, and cultural memory of 20th and 21st-century conflict in Europe and the Middle East. Between 2006 and 2014 he was co-director of the ‘Great Arab Revolt Project’ in southern Jordan – the first archaeological investigation of the 1916-18 Arab Revolt along the Hejaz Railway from Ma’an to Mudawwara. He has worked extensively in France, Belgium, and the Slovenian-Italian borderlands on his First World War projects and museum exhibitions. His recent publications include: 'Killing Time': Archaeology and the First World War (2010), Bodies in Conflict (2014) and The Poppy: A History of Conflict, Loss, Remembrance and Redemption (2014). In 2019, he co-organized and published Dragons on the Western Front: Chinese trench art from the Collection of In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium. His book Desert Insurgency: T.E. Lawrence, Archaeology and the Arab Revolt was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.