Incredible photos. Its like a time capsule going back to 1918. Everything in remarkable condition. They found most of the wood structures, beds, tools, newspapers, and even guns.
The construction is amazing. Wood floors, walls all installed after digging.
It sounds like this site may get a road over it soon. I’m glad they are documenting it really well for later study.
Just want to say thanks for the link aceplace57 really interesting
Wow. Impressive… although, given the condition and placement of some of the artifacts, I almost suspect a hoax.
Wow…a hoax? I’m the most skeptical person for 50 miles in any direction, but this doesn’t suggest a hoax to me at all. it doesn’t raise the red flags that many hoaxes often do.
If the artifact placement bothers you, could it be because the excavation has been “staged” to look like it was originally, before the collapse?
Most of the artifacts looked rusty enough to have be there 90 plus years. The gun stocks on the rifles had rotted away. The drinking glass did seem unusually clean. They may have washed the mud out and put it back in place.
Archaeologists use a grid system to precisely record the location of every artifact. Anything that was cleaned or picked up for examination could easily be put back from where it came from.
Is it my imagination, or is not the mystery item next to the rifle a leather coin purse complete with coins? And in the picture upstream of that, the piece of wood with the funny pointy arch cut out of it looks exactly like any random bootjack I have seen and used.
I’m guessing it is rescue archaeology, where a place is studied before something ‘permanent’ is done to change the area. I have a few neat artifacts from a rescue archaeology site in Minneapolis where the Federal Reserve Bank is now located.
Bootjack was my first thought on that item, too, aruvqan. I don’t know about the other thing; my first impression was that it was too large, but I may be misunderstanding the scale.
It does look like a coin purse. Except, that 10cm ruler next to it gives me the impression the object is about 20cm tall. 7.87 inches. That’s a little to big for a coin purse. 
? I used a paper to make a scale to compare to the item, I got 7 cm. And the old pound coins are large, someone in the German trench was looting … and I still say it is a coin purse. 
I’d bet that the mystery object is a coin purse. I think each division on the ruler is 1 cm (looking at the wood grain below it). But how could archeologists not be able to identify a coin purse?
StG
You’re right. I thought they were showing the entire 10cm ruler in the picture. But, I see now it was only showing part of that ruler.
They never did say what they are planning to do with the German dead they uncovered. I’d expect they will try to identify them and return the remains to their families for burial. Or they could bury them in one of the local German war cemeteries in that area.
About halfway down they say:
Specifically, that would be a jackboot bootjack.
Wow, that’s hard to say three times fast.
I find this sort of archaeology particularly fascinating. My Grandfather and his Brothers volunteered to be part of this conflict in 1915.
They all somehow made it home alive.
And the poor bastards who died in there?
Just another footnote I guess. They would not be alive now anyway.
Nothing hoaxy about the excavation pictures to this archaeologist’s eyes. Inside undisturbed clay, even organic stuff keeps for one hundred times longer than WWI dates back to. 10 000-year old tools made from wood and bone can be found in numerous North European Stone Age sites with favorable conditions for preservation. 100-year old leather, wood, bone etc. are very common finds on rescue excavations at historical sites around here. Substantial wooden structures, as in the WWI site under discussion, are special; *in situ *human remains from a catastrophic event is what makes this find extraordinary.
Funny how the article says ‘intact’ rifles under pictures showing guns that are basically rotten, rusted, twisted lumps of tooled wood and metal.
Too late to edit:
I, too, wondered about the ‘mystery items’ with pretty obvious IDs (the bootstrap and the coin purse). Rescue digs are usually really frantic, with a small team of archaeologists trying to record what they can under constant pressure from the developers, with little time and resources. I can imagine a reporter shoving a recorder mic into the face of a hasty digger and using an off-hand quote like “we don’t know what it is” on the article. Things like this happen all the time.
Yep, bootjack. The set of three pouches below it is a triple ammunition pouch.