Fig 6 - uploaded by Seren Griffiths
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An illustration from Notes on Trench Warfare for Infantry Officers: Revised Diagrams, December 1916 produced by His Majesty's Stationery Office General Staff, a technical pamphlet for the excavation of trenches. As a Pioneer, earthworks and digging-in were foundations of Buckley's military practice. The aesthetics military of trench illustration can be seen when comparing this image with Buckley's section drawing of his archaeological practice in the First World War, as shown in Fig. 3. (© the Crown)
Source publication
Francis Buckley was extraordinary; an officer responsible for arming grenades, excavating trenches, surveying, sketch-mapping, and military intelligence, his actions were a roll-call of the First World War's bloodiest battles. The psychological toll was significant. War remade the man and created the archaeologist. Under fire, Buckley recorded preh...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... (such as "Aurignac"). Comparisons of his original sketches show the debt that this early archaeological aesthetic owed to military fieldcraft and recording, as can be seen when Buckley's section drawings locating the "Red Line" finds from Coigneux are compared with drawing conventions from the British Infantry Officers' instruction manuals (Fig. ...
Context 2
... His notebooks indicate that from one site, March Hill on Marsden Moor, over three years he recovered around 6,868 surface-finds, and excavated a further 1,159 lithics (Tolson Museum, AN 43.7.57). In his peacetime fieldwork, Buckley applied the skills he had learnt in his wartime fieldwork (see Fig. 3); he drew sections, recorded panoramas (see Fig. 6), located findspots on maps. The ascetic environment may have brought to mind the conditions of ...
Citations
During the First World War (1914–1918), many service personnel collected souvenirs from the countries in which they served, but the collection of antiquities by service personnel remains a neglected area of research. Between 2019 and 2021, the R. D. Milns Antiquities Museum at the University of Queensland and the Queensland Museum collaborated in a research partnership to learn more about the antiquities collecting activities of First World War personnel from Queensland, Australia. In addition to reporting on the preliminary results of that pilot study, this paper also begins to address the question of why antiquities appealed to service personnel. Most artefacts in this study are from the private collections donated to the Queensland Museum and from three privately owned collections. Artefacts are mostly small ‘curios’ such as scarabs, figurines, coins and fragments of monuments collected in various theatres of the war.
