[1][2] He was the co-presenter of the BBC series Two Men in a Trench, co-founder of the Journal of Conflict Archaeology, and guest expert on Time Team.
After obtaining his PhD in 1995 he spent two years living in Brighton while working for the field archaeology unit of University College London.
He then went on to make two series of Two Men in a Trench with Neil Oliver which introduced the public to the archaeology of British battlefields.
[7][8][9] Together with historians Bernard Wilkin and Robin Schäfer, he discovered that the bones of the soldiers killed at the Battle of Waterloo were dug out and sold to the sugar factories to be turned into spodium.
[10] In 2008, his first novel, The Minutes of the Lazarus Club, a thriller based on the life of the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was published by Michael Joseph.