Improving wellbeing
Operation Nightingale, responsible for the main excavation described here, set out to see how archaeology could help traumatised military personnel (see features Jan/Feb 2012/122 and May/Jun 2014/136). There is much anecdotal support for the idea, for both veterans and archaeology. A new study has quantified this success for the first time.
Operation Nightingale arose out of simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and growing public awareness of the impact of the conflicts on returning participants, now encouraged to share their experiences rather than hide them. It was developed in 2011 by Sergeant Diarmaid Walshe vr of the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to 1 Rifles (My archaeology Sep/Oct 2012/126) and Richard Osgood, co-author of this
feature. It inspired Breaking Ground Heritage ( bgh), a similar scheme led by veterans and founded by Richard Bennett, a former Troop Sergeant in the Royal Marines (see feature Jul/Aug 2018/161).
Forty individuals were asked about their feelings before and after taking part in three bghfield projects. Participants showed significant improvements on three scales, among them indices for anxiety and depression: British Archaeology has graphed these two using the study’s figures. “The results demonstrate decreases in the severity of the symptoms of depression and anxiety,” conclude the study’s authors, “and of feelings of isolation, along with an increase in mental wellbeing and in sense of value.”
See “Dig in: an evaluation of the role of archaeological fieldwork for the improved wellbeing of military veterans,” by Paul Everill, Richard Bennett & Karen Burnell, Antiquity 94 (2020). MP