Archaeology, D-Day, and the Battle of Normandy

Considering Second World War Archaeological Heritage in France

“…Within just a few years, archaeologists have begun to focus on new issues, and a scientific dialogue has been initiated with historians and museums such as at the Caen Memorial. Subjects pertaining to material culture in times of war, specific behaviour of soldiers or civilians, or the violence of war itself as a whole, have already appeared in a few recent publications and were synthesised in a book entirely dedicated to the archaeology of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy Marcigny 2019 first published in 2014;Carpentier et al 2021). Other studies are currently in progress, dealing with, for instance, waste management by troops at the frontline (Carpentier and Labbey forthcoming), or with the experience of civilians, namely children and women in the refuge-quarries of Fleury-sur-Orne (Carpentier and Marcigny forthcoming; Morvant 2023).…”

“…This field of research can no longer be regarded as trivial. The archaeological data gathered over the last ten years has contributed to the renewal of the subjects and the overcoming of the heroic myths associated with the so-called 'Longest Day' (Carpentier et al 2021). In the context of an interdisciplinary approach, data on material culture is now systematically compared with historical archives, photographs and testimonials.…”

LiDAR and conflict archaeology: the Battle of the Bulge (1944–1945)

“…Among current advances in Second World War archaeology, fieldwork has combined fieldwalking with excavations and archive research (Price & Knecht 2012; Seitsonen 2018), and geophysical survey techniques have helped to determine the degree of preservation of the buried battlefield deposits (Everett et al 2006; Stele et al 2021). Increasing access to historical aerial photographic archives (Cowley & Stichelbaut 2012) and to historical documentation and remote-sensing data have made it possible to undertake large-scale mapping projects, for example on the defence of Britain (Council for British Archaeology 2006), German prisoner-of-war camps (Carpentier & Marcigny 2014; Vermard et al 2016) and defensive and logistical landscapes in France (Capps-Tunwell et al 2018; Carpentier et al 2021) and Finland (Stichelbaut et al 2021b).…”

“…The remains of that conflict have been studied in detail through excavation (Desfossés et al 2008), aerial photography (Stichelbaut et al 2017), geophysical prospection (Masters 2016) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) survey (De Matos-Machado 2018;Gheyle et al 2018). The results of these studies have broadened scholarly horizons (Carpentier et al 2021), attracted attention to other twentieth-century battle sites and, especially, emphasised the greater spatial extent and more varied character of the landscapes of the Second World War that resulted from that conflict's more mobile type of warfare (Dolejš et al 2020;Seitsonen & Ikäheimo 2021). Among current advances in Second World War archaeology, fieldwork has combined fieldwalking with excavations and archive research (Price & Knecht 2012;Seitsonen 2018), and geophysical survey techniques have helped to determine the degree of preservation of the buried battlefield deposits (Everett et al 2006;Stele et al 2021).…”