Who We Are
Research Fellows
2025-2027
Jo Ball
Dr. Ball is an archaeologist based in northwest England, specialising in the archaeology of
warfare in the ancient classical world. She is currently a Lecturer in Ancient History at
Manchester Metropolitan University, and a University Teacher at the University of Liverpool. She
graduated with a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Liverpool which explored site
formation processes on Ancient Greek and Roman open-field battle sites. She has worked on
several ancient conflict projects, including excavations at the site of the AD 9 Battle of the
Teutoburg (Kalkriese, Germany), and a preliminary survey project at the Greek battlefield of
Plataea. Her research focuses on a wide range of ancient conflict and military themes, including
the archaeology of Ancient Greek and Roman conflict sites (both battles and sieges), Roman
military equipment, Roman military psychology and combat trauma, and the experience of
retired veterans in the Roman world. She has published several articles on aspects of this
research, as well as two Roman-themed monographs, one on Publius Quinctilius Varus and the
AD 9 Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the other on Tacfarinas and rebellion against Rome in
Northwest Africa AD 17-24. She also has a side interest in the American Civil War and its
connections to Liverpool, a subject which she teaches on regularly at the University of Liverpool,
as well as contributing to a multi-institution project dedicated to this subject.
Helen Basson
Ms. Basson’s professional background is in Landscape Design as co-founder of Scape Design a practice specializing in creating sustainable, low-maintenance gardens in tough Mediterranean climates. Helen co-designed show gardens worldwide that won numerous medals including golds at Singapore, Philadelphia, Moscow, Japan, China, France, Sicily and Chelsea.
However her passion has always been history and in particular the formation of landscape through the interaction of humans and nature over time. Thus in 2018 Helen decided to focus on Landscape Archaeology, gaining an MA from the University of Sheffield in this subject (looking at the WW2 landscape of the Bocage in Normandy) and is currently in the final stages of a PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK researching conflict landscape recovery using the case study of the First World War battlefields. Her goal is to use the lessons from the past to create a framework for current traumatic landscape regeneration.
She has been a core team member of Archaeological projects with the Battlefield Archaeology Group in Normandy and Monte Cassino as well as in the Somme (where she lives) looking at landscape changes due to conflict from both world wars.
Helen regularly sits on the jury panel for the ‘Peace Gardens’ Initiative in Europe, whereby designers from different countries compete to create a peace garden at a location that is of particular historical relevance to their native country from the First World War. She also consults on historical landscape and archaeological considerations for design projects worldwide, and is a regular speaker at both Conflict Archaeology and Landscape Design schools and conferences.
Matthew Kalos
Dr. Kalos earned his PhD from Temple University in 2017. His doctoral research focused on the American Revolutionary War’s Battle of Paoli. Dr. Kalos created and applied a layered landscape approach, examining how conflict archaeology sites can be examined through the lens of the physical, the cultural, the battle, and the mnemonic landscapes. Currently, Dr. Kalos serves as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lincroft, New Jersey’s Brookdale Community College. At Brookdale, Dr. Kalos teaches courses in anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and GIS. In addition to teaching in the classroom, Dr. Kalos created an archaeological field school where he teaches archaeological methods to students at sites throughout central New Jersey.
Richard Leese
Dr. Richard Leese is a conflict archaeology researcher, formerly of the University of Huddersfield. His doctoral research was in the archaeology of early modern sieges of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in England. Prior to this Richard studied for an MLitt in Battlefield and Conflict Archaeology at the University of Glasgow in 2013, and as an undergraduate was a War Studies student at the University of Wolverhampton in the mid-2000s. His current research interests include small-arms bullet impact scars on historic structures, and late medieval battlefields, and civil defence structures of the Cold War.
Euan Loarridge
Dr. Loarridge is a graduate of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology and completed his PhD at that University in 2023. His doctoral thesis, which explored the creation and maintenance of community in Scottish military units during the First World War, was supervised by Professor Tony Pollard and Dr. Catriona Macdonald. Following the completion of his studies he has taught conflict archaeology on the University of Utrecht’s Summer School Course ‘Battlefields Uncovered’, and for the past nine years he has acted as a finds officer for Waterloo Uncovered’s archaeological surveys of the 1815 Waterloo Battlefield.
Joseph Snider
Mr. Snider’s background combines over a decade and a half of experience in the Cultural Resources Management (CRM) field, including the successful completion of well over 400 CRM projects throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Owing to his extensive fieldwork experience in geophysical survey, photogrammetric modeling, archaeological excavation, and historical architecture survey, Snider has a wide breadth of expertise in historical residential, commercial, industrial, cemetery, and conflict site interpretation. With experience spanning three centuries of conflict, and large parts of the globe, Snider has participated in a variety of conflict site research from the excavation of a pre-French and Indian War conflict site in Ohio, to the geophysical survey of battlefields and Indian boarding school cemeteries in South Dakota, remote sensing surveys of earthen forts throughout the U.S., the geophysical survey of enslaved African American cemeteries in the Mid-Atlantic, and the geophysical survey and excavation of prisoner of war camp cemeteries and plane crash sites in Europe and southeast Asia.
Snider currently works for Terracon Consultants, Inc., in Columbus, Ohio, where he is responsible for a wide variety of geophysical survey in support of CRM projects from Phase I through Phase III archaeological survey assessment. Snider also currently serves in variety of positions within nonprofit local historical societies and preservation groups, including as Vice President of the Perry County Historical Society, and Archaeological Consultant to the Perry County Soil and Water Conservation District. As a result, he spends much of his spare time surveying historical buildings, archaeological sites, and historical cemeteries in southeast Ohio.
Advisory Board
John Carman
Dr. Carman is, with his partner Patricia Carman, co-Director of the Bloody Meadows Project. Formerly Senior Lecturer in Heritage Valuation at the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage, University of Birmingham, UK and currently Honorary Associate Professor in the School of History and Cultures of that institution, he co-founded the Bloody Meadows Project which investigates historic battlefields as landscapes in 1998. Having organised a number of conference sessions at international conferences as well as the Fifth Fields of Conflict conference in Oudenaarde, Belgium in 2008, he is co-author with Patricia Carman of Bloody Meadows: Investigating Landscapes of Battle (2006) and Battlefields from Event to Heritage (2020), sole author of Archaeologies of Conflict (2013), editor of Material Harm: archaeological approaches to warfare and violence (1997) and co-editor ofAncient Warfare: archaeological perspectives (1999). He has also written extensively in the field of Archaeological Heritage. He is an active member of the World Archaeological Congress, having edited the journal of that organization Archaeologies since 2016; and of the European Association of Archaeologists, for which he acts as Chair of the Advisory Committee on Heritage and as a member of the Statutes Committee.
Stephen Humphreys
Dr. Humphreys co-founded the 501(c)(3) American Veterans Archaeological Recovery in 2016 and has served as CEO since that time. He is a veteran: prior to his graduate studies he was a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force. He has carried out dozens of excavations alongside American military veterans, the majority of them on conflict sites, and specializes in developing methods to use archaeology to deliver tangible benefits to this population.
Stephen holds a Ph.D. in archaeology from Durham University as well as an MA in Archaeology and Biblical Studies and an MA in Theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the PI of the AVAR Conflict Archaeology School-Camden and Finding Medina Projects and has directed fieldwork on numerous Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recoveries. He is a National Geographic Explorer with experience excavating and directing projects in Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Sicily, and the USA.
Stephen@conflictarchaeology.org
Blanka Matkovic
Dr. Matkovic earned her PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) and a PhD in History from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). Previously she also earned a BA in history, an MSc in international relations and national security, an MPhil in history, and a PG Certificate in museum studies. Furthermore, she completed two one-year programs and several shorter courses in archaeology and heritage. In the past 19 years her research has been focused on exploring conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 20th century, mainly mass atrocities during and immediately after the Second World War, remembrance culture, the creation and transformation of heritage, dealing with the ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’ heritage, public memory, transition from conflict to post-conflict societies with a focus on rethinking the notion of a ‘normal life’, and the ongoing controversies in historical narratives. In her research she takes a multidisciplinary approach relying on history, political science, heritage studies, anthropology, psychology, and modern conflict archaeology frameworks and methodologies. Apart from 50 academic papers and twelve books, she published numerous newspaper articles on the impact of modern conflicts on Croatian society, and gave presentations in Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Portugal, Switzerland, the USA and the UK. She is a co-founder and a current president of the Croatian Society of Historians “Dr. Rudolf Horvat” which is a member of the Croatian International Network for the Communist Crimes Research and Memory, and a member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.
bmatkovic@warwickgrad.net
Sam Wilson
Mr. Wilson has been active in the field of conflict archaeology since undertaking his first battlefield survey in 2009 during University studies, and have gone on to work on a wide range of conflict sites in the UK and Europe. Highlights include directing the search for the 1471 Battle of Barnet for Huddersfield University, training archaeologists in battlefield survey techniques for the largest research survey yet undertaken in Ireland at Vinegar Hill and since 2015, supervising archaeological teams during the Waterloo Uncovered project. He has been heavily involved with the UK Battlefields Trust for a number of years as ‘archaeological advisor’, spent time as a Trustee and now sit on their ‘Battlefields Panel’ which advises on planning matters impacting battlefields. Along with Trust colleagues he contributed to new guidance documents for battlefield investigation standards in the UK and have led fieldwork on a number of key sites, with particular success at Stow-on-the-Wold and Langport battlefields.
He is particularly passionate about archaeology and well-being and to this end, has worked extensively with military veterans, most notably at Waterloo and during involvement with Operation Nightingale projects, a Ministry of Defence initiative. Recently, through employment in commercial archaeology at Cotswold Archaeology, he has begun work with the US DPAA to recover missing US military personnel from sites in the UK, leading excavations of two aircraft in 2024 and 2025 alongside serving military, Op Nightingale veterans and community volunteers. He is also passionate about teaching and has taken regular part in delivering a battlefield archaeology module at the University of Winchester, teaching students fieldwork techniques on a real battlefield, as well as case studies.
His current research interests are centred on 17th century and Napoleonic battlefield archaeology, as well as 20th century aircraft. He is also undertaking work with the Battlefields Trust on the 1549 Western Rebellion.
Sam@conflictarchaeology.org
Emeline Verna
Dr. Emeline Verna is a senior lecturer in biological anthropology at Aix-Marseille University, France. Her research is focuses on individual variability of the human skeleton including analyses of the health status (trauma, etc.) of individuals to aid in individual identification. This research intersects when studying human remains in military contexts, enabling better characterization of specific populations by comparing to temporally and spatially distinct populations. She participates in excavations of soldiers in partnership with the relevant organizations, such as ONaVG and VDK, when they uncover military remains from the 19th and 20th centuries. She is co-editor of Archaeo-anthropology of Conflicts in France: From the earlier Middle Ages to the Second World War (2025).
Emeline@conflictarchaeology.org
Directors
Michelle Sivilich
Founder and Co-Director
Dr. Sivilich is a nonprofit executive and archaeologist with more than 25 years of experience in cultural resource management, education, and environmental restoration. She grew up metal detecting and working alongside historians and archaeologists, developing an early appreciation for the stories embedded in both natural and cultural landscapes.
She attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland, spending every free moment volunteering and working with Historic St. Mary’s City—Maryland’s first capital, founded in 1634. Her senior thesis contributed to building the first GIS coverage for HSMC. She later expanded her focus at Indiana State University, where she pursued the study of ancient DNA to better understand past populations and social dynamics. Her thesis, Determining Familial Relationships Using Ancient DNA from Urban and Rural Historic Burials, explored the then–cutting-edge use of nuclear DNA (rather than mitochondrial DNA) and demonstrated that valuable information can be recovered even from fragmented genetic material.
Returning to archaeology, Dr. Sivilich earned her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida and continued to pursue her interest in using archaeological methods to investigate social phenomena. Her dissertation, Measuring the Adaptation of Military Response During the Second Seminole War in Florida (1835–1842): KOCOA and the Role of a West Point Military Academy Education, examined how military training and doctrine shaped conflict on the Florida frontier.
With advanced degrees in anthropology, archaeology, history, and the life sciences, Michelle brings a deeply multidisciplinary perspective to every project. She has served as Executive Director for multiple nonprofits—including the Gulf Archaeology Research Institute—and has contributed to nationally funded battlefield archaeology initiatives and public history education programs.
Michelle is passionate about preserving natural and cultural heritage and is committed to empowering the next generation of community leaders through science, storytelling, and stewardship through her consulting business Rock Paper Steel.
Michelle@conflictarchaeology.org
Colin Parkman
Co-Director
Dr. Parkman has been a professional archaeologist for 18 years, with 15 years as a specialist in conflict and battlefield archaeology. He graduated from The Ohio State University in 2008 with a BA in Anthropology, where I focused on bioarchaeology, forensic archaeology and forensic anthropology. In 2011, he graduated from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom with an MSc in Human Osteology and Palaeopathology, his thesis is titled An Evaluation of Search Techniques, including Cadaver Dogs for Historic Conflict Mass Graves. In 2019, he received my PhD in History and Archaeology from the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom. His dissertation is titled Experimental firing, and analysis of impacted 17th-18th century lead bullets. Since 2011, he has completed multiple battlefield surveys and conflict archaeological excavations across North America, the United Kingdom and Belgium. He has experimented with various field methodologies, and survey strategies for battlefield and conflict sites, as well as using various GPS and recording methodologies, post excavation artefact curation and analysis, and post excavation GIS spatial mapping and analysis.
Colin@conflictarchaeology.org