CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 29 WELLBEING and HERITAGE RICHARD OSGOOD Broken pots, mending lives Operation Nightingale uses archaeology to help the recovery of service personnel returned from military tours, and has expanded to include veterans and army widows. In 2011 heritage professionals within the Ministry of Defence (MOD) established a programme called Operation Nightingale to use archaeology in aiding the recovery of service personnel returned from military tours. Since then, the project and a number of the veterans have gone on to study the subject at university or to work as professionals within the industry. Projects created for rehabilitation and recovery for the military include acting, art and gardening. Heritage work can include similar elements to all of these and more. We have designed the various exercises to use existing skills (including the ability to dig trenches!) as well as giving new ones, which can be recorded on a skills passport. Added to the recovery elements, we have attempted to incorporate the abilities of serving personnel into the fieldwork, both to add to their professional development and to increase the amount of work we can achieve. Surveyors in the Royal Engineers, forensics specialists in the Royal Military Police (crucial for the recovery of the convict remains in Gosport on Exercise Magwich) and combat support boat drivers in the Royal Logistics Corps have swelled our ranks. The army’s Cultural Property Protection Team (a legal requirement following UK ratification of the Hague Convention and the two associated protocols) joined one of our excavations to learn about archaeological methods. Their participation in building-related projects would be helpful in potential future overseas deployments. With all of this work we have had a nominal Hippocratic oath of doing no harm. This has applied to participants as well as partners in professional bodies and companies. The work needs a specific requirement: addressing the MOD’s heritage-at-risk holdings, evaluating curatorial regimes and methods or establishing new practice guidance. It also has to be enjoyable. Projects are chosen carefully for their potential discoveries or stories, and if there is a link to military forebears, so much the better. In designing the various aspects of the programme (‘exercises’ as we have called them, to fit the military nomenclature), we were initially cognisant of the potential for triggering negative reactions among the participants with the discovery of human remains, which are not uncommon on excavations. Project designs incorporate what we deem to be an appropriate The team investigated the site and reconstructed an experimental replica roundhouse at Butser Ancient Farm using authentic tools and heritage craft skills. (All photos by Harvey Mills)
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