University of Huddersfield welcomes Centre of Archaeology and its top reputation
Now, having moved from the University of Staffordshire, the centre’s new home is the University of Huddersfield, where it will continue to develop work in the UK and overseas.
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Hide AdThe team has investigated more than 60 Holocaust sites across Europe – discovering, for example, evidence of gas chambers and mass graves at the site of the extermination camp at Treblinka in what was Nazi-occupied Poland – and other projects led by Prof Sturdy Colls’ colleagues Kevin Colls, Will Mitchell and Dr Daria Cherkaska have focused on the Herero and Nama Genocide in Namibia and Holocaust-era mass graves in Ukraine.
The centre will now be linking up Holocaust Centre North, based at Huddersfield University, to share and highlight more of its work – one of the main reasons for being in the West Yorkshire town, says Prof Sturdy Colls.
She adds: "I do lot of something called geophysical survey, which allows you to scan beneath the ground.
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Hide Ad"This gives data for comparison with aerial photography and archive research, and gives a picture of what’s there while adhering to the sensitivities connected to Jewish graves.
"We were the first people to find the Treblinka gas chambers through excavations, off the back of the non-invasive research.
"We look forward to working with colleagues in our school, including colleagues in history, English, drama and music.
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Hide Ad"We will be working with Huddersfield's world-leading archaeogenetics group and are planning to collaborate with the university’s AI researchers to investigate how AI can help our work.”
The team has brought several continuing research projects to Huddersfield. Linked to Treblinka is the centre’s project around the Jewish refugee children who had lost their families in the death camp and were evacuated to the Lake District in 1945.
The centre’s experts have excavated the site of a ‘lost’ village near Windermere, and are now archiving physical evidence of the children’s time in the area. They are also carrying out a major investigation at a site at Trawniki, in Poland, where thousands of men were trained to be guards at Nazi concentration camps and where thousands of Jews, Poles and Soviet POWs were murdered.
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Hide AdThe team is also continuing to investigate mass graves in Ukraine, despite the Russian invasion in 2022.
The centre’s experts have featured several television documentaries and the team’s community archaeology work includes a project at Tamworth Castle that has enabled local people help uncover a medieval-era mill.
A new project aims to help to preserve a building that belonged to William Shakespeare’s daughter in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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