Archaeology doesn't have to be focussed on the Romans or the Middle Ages.
A team from Winchester University has been uncovering evidence of buildings that are little over a hundred years old.
Around 25 students and their teachers have been on the site of former Morn Hill army camp, a massive base on farmland to the east of Winchester during World War One from 1914-18.
The excavation in two trenches has focussed on the prison stockade set up on northern edge of the site by the Americans, hundreds of thousands of whom passed through Winchester on their way to the Western Front in 1917 and 1918. The jail would have mainly dealt with minor misdemeanours of being drunk and disorderly or fighting.
Leading the dig has been Dr Phil Marter. He said: "This dig is part of the project to see what survives of the camp archaeology. We know more or less what the camp looked like as we have the plans made by the Royal Engineers in 1919.
"We are hoping to understand how the prison stockade was constructed and find cultural material.
The diggers found items such as buttons and broken crockery and part of a early motor engine spark plug.
The stockade itself was surrounded by posts and barbed wire with the huts made of prefabricated steel and corrugated iron and a sturdier cell on concrete blocks.
Dr Marter said the dig served a wider purpose. "It is not just about trying to understand where the archaeological remains are under the fields. We are trying to get people to thinking of things from the First World War can be archaeology as well. As live witnesses disappear we have fewer and fewer ways to explore that part of the past.
"Archaeology is a way of exploring the First World War, not just the focus on the trenches, people have dug them up, but there not been so much focus on the infrastructure back home in Britain, the huge effort to get all the men out to the Western Front. We want to highlight the importance of that."
The Morn Hill camp was vast and there are some estimates that two million passed through on their way to France heading from Winchester down to Southampton docks and on to Le Havre in France. It was large enough to hold 50,000 soldiers at any one time.
Local MP Steve Brine visited the site and told Dr Marter: “This is fascinating work and it’s so moving to think these quiet fields of the Itchen Valley were, for many, the last glimpse of England before they headed off to the battlefields of the First World War across the Channel.”
Pictured; Steve and his son William chatting with students and, second, with Phil Marter and landowner Michael Gray.
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