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Department of Archaeology

 

Confinement and Conflict

The Channel Island of Jersey's First World War POW camp was in use from 1915-1919, and housed German naval personnel. Between 2015 and 2019, a collaborative project between Universities of Cambridge (Dr Gilly Carr), Liverpool (Professor Harold Mytum) and Bristol (Professor Nick Saunders) sought to map all extant features of the site using magnetometry, photogrammetry and archaeological survey techniques. The site, then as now, sits at the base of sand dunes. Lacking any kind of blueprint for a POW camp, those who built the camp first flattened the undulating land as far as possible, and the flat-packed, barrack-block camp was laid out in the style of a British army camp. Although the wooden buildings were sold off after WWI and the camp dismantled, over the last 100 years sand dunes have reclaimed some of the area. However, the foundations of buildings and the perimeter of the camp have dictated dune formation in places, as shown in modern aerial photos.

https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/316605

This gives a link to Mytum, H., Philpott, R., Carr, G., & Saunders, N. J. (2021). This Camp seemed almost to be a model of its kind”: the Les Blanches Banques Camp for German World War 1 Prisoners of War. Annual Bulletin of the Société Jersiaise https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.63717

Funder

The Society of Antiquaries

The McDonald Institute small grants

The University of Liverpool

Project Lead

Project Tags

Themes: 
Environment, Landscapes and Settlement
Periods of interest: 
Other Historical
Geographical areas: 
Britain
Research Expertise / Fields of study: 
Environmental Archaeology, Geoarchaeology, and Landscape studies
Subjects: 
Archaeology
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