Tony Pollard is Professor of Conflict History & Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, where he co-founded the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology in 2005, and the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in 2006. Since then, he has taught military history and conflict archaeology at undergraduate and post-graduate levels and supervised multiple PhDs. Tony has written extensively for academic and popular audiences and is a published novelist. Current research interests range from the Jacobite wars in Scotland, with his work at Culloden attracting international attention, to the cultural heritage of the Falklands War (he is co-director of the Falklands War Mapping Project, which in 2022 involved military veterans in the archaeological survey of their own battlefield for the first time). His expertise has been sought after by a variety of clients, and in 2007 he led the team which located First World War mass graves of Australian troops at Fromelles, in France on behalf of the Australian Army.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, he introduced the wider public to battlefield archaeology as co-presenter of the BBC TV series Two Men in a Trench and has continued to work in television, most recently appearing in National Geographic’s Defending Europe. In 2011, his team investigated Stalag Luft 3 in a project documented in Channel 4’s Digging the Great Escape, which included a career highlight when he rediscovered the entrance to Harry, the tunnel used in the 1944 escape of Allied POWs. Since 2015 he has been the academic lead and a field director for Waterloo Uncovered, the charity which engages military veterans in the investigation of the 1815 battlefield in Belgium.