Dr Glenn Foard, Time Team and the Battle of Hastings

The battle of Hastings, fought on the 14th October 1066, was the key action in the campaign which saw the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England. The traditional site of the action, at Battle in East Sussex, is a Registered battlefield in the care of English Heritage.

During 2011 the University of Huddersfield, with 50% funding plus scientific support from English Heritage, undertook a small scale pilot survey on the site. The investigation principally involved metal detecting to recover unstratified metal artefacts.

The work revealed a level of contamination with modern artefacts far greater than anything yet encountered on intact areas of historic battlefield anywhere in the UK and Europe. This material is from WWII training, and from public access and events and, most worrying, from re-enactment events held annually since the 1980s. Our work has shown that this contamination has made it almost impossible to conduct an intensive survey of the site. Even more importantly, it has shown that the re-enactment poses a major threat to any battle archaeology that may remain on the site, as reproduction artefacts are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from the originals of 1006, especially when corroded from laying in the ground for decades.

In August 2013 we returned to the site to undertake further pilot work as part of a Time Team Special which will probably be aired early in 2014. In this work we sampled a small area of the site using a machine to strip the upper levels of the topsoil. This has shown that it is technically possible to remove the contamination of the last fifty years to make metal detecting survey possible. Whether this is a viable strategy for the wider investigation of the site now needs to be determined in discussion with English Heritage.

Dr Glenn Foard, Reader in Battlefield Archeology, The University of Huddersfield