The Essay: New Generation Thinkers

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The Essay: New Generation Thinkers: Battlefield Finds

Battlefield Finds

New Generation Thinkers

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Seren Griffiths tells the story of the soldier turned archaeologist Francis Buckley.

Seren Griffiths takes us to the battlefields of the First World War and a soldier's groundbreaking collection of Paleolithic, Meseolithic and Neolithic stone tool artefacts.

Gold fob seals, Sheffield silver, Mesolithic stone tools - these were some of the discoveries detailed in the 28 papers, books and pamphlets published by a soldier turned archaeologist who began looking at what you might find in the soil in the middle of a World War I battlefield. In her Essay, Seren Griffiths traces the way Francis Buckley used his training for military intelligence to shape the way he set about digging up and recording objects buried both in war-torn landscapes of France and then  on the Yorkshire moors around his home. 

Producer: Torquil MacLeod 

Dr Seren Griffiths teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University and is involved in a project to use new scientific dating techniques to write the first historical narrative for two thousand years of what was previously 'prehistoric' Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland. She has also organised public events at the excavations she co- directs at Bryn Celli Ddu in North Wales and you can hear her talking about midsummer at a Neolithic monument in an episode of Free Thinking.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to choose ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Ten academics make and present radio programmes for Radio 3 based on their research.

New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Council to select ten academics each year to make radio programmes based on their research.

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