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Conflict Archaeology
Nicholas Saunders
Nicholas Saunders is professor of material culture in the School of Arts at the University of Bristol. He was educated at the universities of Sheffield (BA in archaeology), Cambridge (MPhil in social anthropology) and Southampton (PhD in archaeology). He has held teaching and research positions at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of the West Indies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, and University College London. He is the world's leading authority on the anthropology and archaeology of the First World War. His exhibition of trench art was the centrepiece of the 'In Flanders Fields' Museum in Ypres, Belgium.
Saunders has also done fieldwork and research in pre-Columbian and historical archaeology of the Americas. He has published on material cultures and landscapes of Mesoamerica, South America and the Caribbean. His most recent research has been on the aesthetics of brilliance and colour in indigenous Amerindian symbolism, an extensive survey investigation of the Nazca Lines in Peru, and the anthropological archaeology of twentieth-century conflict and its legacies along the Soca (Isonzo) Front on the Slovenian-Italian border.
The author of more than 20 books and dozens of academic monographs, Saunders is also a frequent commentator and guest on television and radio programmes and contributor to such publications as Nature and New Scientist.