(pictured Anzac soldiers on a rest break at Gallipoli.Professor Tony Sagona and a team of archeologists, historians, classicists, geographers and government officials from Australia, New Zealand and Turkey, have been surveying the Gallipoli battlefield. The materials being uncovered are building a more complete account of life in the trenches and how it may have varied at the front line across opposing sides of the conflict. Linking new with old data and documenting all the discoveries in the field is a key objective of the survey and also a major challenge. Digital mapping of physical location with the data as it is uncovered enables new details to emerge and confirm aspects of the battle. Professor Sagona and colleagues will also be publishing a book about the survey in August 2015 with Cambridge University Press.
The early results have been surprising. Unlike the fertile fields of Belgium and France, Gallipoli’s rocky soil was never plowed after the war, making it a battlefield archaeologist’s goldmine. In its field work over the past four years, the team has mapped miles of trenches and recovered more than 1,000 artifacts, more than anyone expected to find at a battlefield a century old. “I’m surprised at how much is left,” says University of Melbourne researcher Antonio Sagona, the survey’s lead archaeologist. “There’s nowhere on the Western Front where there’s a continuous line like this. It’s the best-preserved World War I battlefield anywhere in the world.” SOURCE
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Mavi Boncuk | An uneven battle in the field kitchens of Gallipoli
This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppmsca.13709
(Courtesy JHAS)
This 1915 photograph shows an Ottoman field kitchen. The remains of bread ovens suggest that Ottoman soldiers had more access to hot food than Allied troops did.
A SIMPLE Ottoman kitchen - complete with brick oven - discovered during a survey of Gallipoli has highlighted the extremes of life on the 1915 battlefield.
While the Anzac Diggers were surviving on bully beef and other canned and processed food, their Turkish opponents ate fresh produce prepared in a terraced kitchen.
The field kitchen, where researchers also found ceramic roof tiles as evidence of other permanent structures, was built much closer to the front line than the allied food area, which was littered with tins and jam jars. Located during the second phase of a five-year joint Australian, New Zealand and Turkish project to survey the famous battlefield for the first time ahead of the 2015 centenary, the Ottoman kitchen was among the most revealing discoveries made last month, according to survey archaeologist Tony Sagona, from Melbourne University.
Soldiers of the 6th Field Battery on a water-carrying fatigue stop at Gallipoli, 1915. THE AGE . news . 04 OCTOBER 2011 . pic from book "Anzac and Empire".
''One of the things that struck me … was that all the metal food containers that we found came from the Anzac side of the battlefield. None came from the Ottoman side,'' he said. ''The Ottoman army was largely cooking their food brought in from the villages.''
Professor Sagona said that while the allies had field kitchens with campfires, their diet differed dramatically. Documents from Turkish archives suggest soup was a feature on the Ottoman menu.
Focusing on the northern front-line areas of the battlefield, archaeologists and historians also found one of Gallipoli's most significant sites hidden among the peninsula's scrubby vegetation - Malone's Terraces at Quinn's Post, considered a critical part of the allied line.
The Age News Lieutenant Colonel William Malone to go with story re Findings from the second fieldwork survey of the Gallipolli battlefield were released today.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone. Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library, New
Historian Richard Reid said the Ottoman army and the Anzacs would have been no more than 10 metres apart.
''If either side had broken through, that would have been the end of the campaign,'' he said.
The allied terraces, which had been feared lost to erosion, were named after Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone, of New Zealand's Wellington Battalion, who organised the building of the terraces for troops to sleep in. This dramatically improved living conditions when the Kiwis took over from the Australians in June 1915.
Built into the slope of a hill, the terraces were 14 metres long and three metres wide and have now been mapped with GPS and compared with historical battlefield maps, which produced a match. ''We were very excited about that,'' Professor Sagona said. Malone's Terraces were among more than 30 dugouts, terraced areas and tunnel entrances surveyed last month.
Among the more than 130 artefacts retrieved and sent to a local museum were buttons, belt buckles, bullet shells, shards from medicine jars and three bullet-holed water bottles. Several bones were found, re-buried and reported to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but Veterans Affairs Minister Warren Snowdon said it was unlikely they were human as the area had been used as farming land.
THE OTTOMAN ARMY
First Division of 43rd Battalion Gallipoli, Ottoman Empire
Daily Food Ration List (*)
Notice: Effective July 21, 1917, the weight of one loaf of bread, is reduced to ½ kilograms (1.1 lbs)
(*) Source: Salahi Sonyel, The Great War and the Great Tragedy of Anatolia, Türk Tarih Kurumu, Ankara, Türkiye, page 76