After obtaining his PhD in 1995 he spent two years living in Brighton while working for the field archaeology unit of
University College London. In 1997 he returned to work for Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division (GUARD). Following a first visit to
South Africa in 1999, he carried out a project investigating battlefields from the
Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. In 2000, he co-organised, with Phil Freeman of the
University of Liverpool, the first international conference on
battlefield archaeology. 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. He continues to appear in television documentary series and was a regular expert in the National Geographic series Nazi Megastructures. The Centre for Battlefield Archaeology was founded in 2006 and Pollard appointed its director. Since then the centre has gone on to offer the world's first post-graduate course in battlefield and conflict archaeology, while also publishing the
Journal of Conflict Archaeology. The centre has carried out various projects which include the examination of Jacobite battlefields in Scotland, including
Culloden, and investigating of British and Australian mass graves from
World War I at
Fromelles in France. Since 2015 Pollard has served as an Archaeological co-director for the veteran support charity Waterloo Uncovered, conducting archaeology on the battlefield of
Waterloo in Belgium alongside veterans and serving personnel. In 2022, Pollard led the charity's
Falklands War Mapping Project, a field mapping project which examined the surviving archaeology of the Falklands War on the
Falklands Islands, incorporating the perspectives of two British veterans of the
Battle of Mount Tumbledown. == Writing ==