MALTOT, France — What is left over, 75 years after the fighting ended, comes down to this: pockmarked leather fragments from a dead German soldier’s shoe scattered by his shallow battlefield grave.

The field of brown dirt in Maltot, France, cleared for a planned housing development, is quiet, like the surrounding wheat fields that saw fierce fighting during the Normandy invasion of 1944.

Nearby, the villages are now bustling with American visitors in mock World War II uniforms driving imitation vintage jeeps and playing at soldier in these days surrounding the 75th D-Day anniversary. President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron of France, and assorted other dignitaries, arrive for commemorations on Thursday.

France is engaged in an effort to preserve the memory of the days of bloody struggle in a more concrete way. For the past 10 years, a cadre of archaeologists and field researchers unique in Europe has been digging up, documenting and cataloging the physical remains of the Battle of Normandy — bodies, bunkers, weapons — in what has become known as the “Archaeology of D-Day.”