Tony Pollard
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Tony Pollard is an internationally renowned archaeologist specialising in the archaeology of conflict. He is Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University. He is probably best known as co-presenter of the BBC series Two Men in a Trench, the other man being his old friend and one time flat mate Neil Oliver. In 2005 he co-founded the "Journal of Conflict Archaeology" with his colleague Dr. Iain Banks with whom he co-edits the journal.
Tony was born in Macclesfield in the north of England in 1965, though he moved to Oban on the West coast of Scotland in the late 1970s. He studied archaeology at Glasgow University and after graduating stayed on to do a PhD on prehistoric hunter gatherers. After obtaining his PhD in 1995 he spent two years living in Brighton while working for the field archaeology unit of University College London. In 1997 he returned to Glasgow to work for Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD). Following a first visit to South Africa in 1999 he carried out a project investigating battlefields from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. In 2000 he co-organised, with Phil Freeman of Liverpool University, the first ever international conference on Battlefield Archaeology. He then went on to make two series of Two Men in a Trench which introduced the public to the archaeology of British battlefields.
The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology was founded in 2006 and Tony appointed its Director. Since then the Centre has gone on to offer the world's first post-graduate course in Battlefield and Conflict Archaeology. The Centre has carried out various projects which include the examination of Jacobite battlefields in Scotland (including Culloden) and most recently the investigation of British and Australian mass graves from WWI at Fromelles in France.
He has written numerous papers and articles on archaeology and military history and edited several books on subjects as diverse as the early prehistory of Scotland and the archaeology of death. Along with Neil Oliver he wrote the two books accompanying the Two Men in a Trench programmes.
In 2008 his first novel The Minutes of the Lazarus Club, a thriller based on the life of the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, will be published by Penguin.
