In his 40-year career as an archaeologist, Jason Wood has travelled the world, searching for Roman remains in Jordanian citadels and helping to restore royal palaces in Nepal. But his recent project was a little less exotic: digging up a patch of grass by some woods in Bradford.

Ever since he was a small boy, Wood had been thinking about the site on Horton Park Avenue, across the road from the ornate Grand Mosque. He remembered his dad pointing out the overgrown grass where a football club had once stood, wondering for decades how a ground that could hold 37,000 fans could be left to the worms and the weeds.

Forty years later, Wood returned, armed with a trowel and a determination to excavate the remains of what he views as “the Angkor Wat of football”: the forgotten home to Bradford Park Avenue, once one of the biggest teams in Yorkshire, which he thinks is just as important as any Cambodian temple.

The club folded in 1974, mired in debt and overshadowed by Bradford City, its more successful local rival. The site was abandoned, useless to developers because of a restrictive covenant which only permits it to be used for sport or recreation.

That may have thwarted property speculators but it delighted a footy-mad archaeologist. It took little more than light gardening to see that much of the ground was still standing. The concrete steps of the Kop end were clearly visible among the overgrown ash and sycamore trees, and the perimeter wall stood tall, complete with bricked-in recesses where the turnstiles had been installed. A chalk board had also survived, displaying the five-shilling ticket price for the final match where a young Kevin Keegan had helped Scunthorpe to a resounding 5-0 win. So too had the gents toilets and a crash barrier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Terraces from the stadium. Photograph: Neville Gabie/Axis Projects Publishing/handout

Wood worked with a number of artists on the dig, which began in November 2013, funded by the National Football Museum and Arts Council England. Now the story of the excavation has been turned into a book, which has just been nominated for the UK’s most prestigious sports book award. Later this month Breaking Ground: Art, Archaeology and Mythology, edited by Wood and artists Neville Gabie and Alan Ward, will go head to head with biographies of Muhammad Ali and the cyclist Tommy Simpson to be voted William Hill sports book of the year.

It is quite a feat for a self-published book with a 500-copy print run, funded by donations from Bradford Park Avenue fans who are determined that history doesn’t forget the ground that was once a rival to Headingley and Bramall Lane in a Victorian battle for sporting supremacy in the White Rose county. The publishing endeavour mirrored their wider efforts for the old club, which they had revived by turning it into a fan-owned operation in the vein of Manchester’s FC United.

When word spread about the project, fans came to help from all around Bradford and beyond, helping to contextualise the archaeological finds. Some, like four boot studs, were self-explanatory. Some were more puzzling. Perhaps the most bizarre find was a nappy pin, unearthed next to one of the ground hooks behind the left-hand goalpost. It would have remained a mystery were it not for the arrival of Susan Farr, daughter of Chick Farr, a star goalkeeper. She explained that the elastic on her father’s shorts had snapped during a match, forcing the trainer on to the pitch to perform an emergency repair. It was an incident Farr never lived down, and he was regularly showered with pins when he was in goal thereafter.

A collection of marbles found had also been chucked at the poor goalies, it emerged: “The culprit identified himself to us and sheepishly owned up to his youthful misdemeanour, which at the time got him evicted from the ground.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ground in 1966. Photograph: David Pendleton/Axis Projects Publishing/Handout

For Wood it was tremendously handy not having to guess the significance of his finds but having living witnesses explain them. “It would be like having a Roman soldier when I’m digging up a citadel,” he said.

This year the council-owned site was redeveloped into a cricket training facility as part of a project to encourage south Asian youths into the sport. Robert Nichol, another archeologist involved on the dig, who was so devoted to his beloved Middlesbrough FC that he bought a house on the club’s old ground, hopes the council will not forget the site’s heritage.

“Park Avenue was a people’s palace,” he writes in the book. “I hope through our project we have opened up a portal to a 1,001 memories but equally also perhaps opened a new chapter for a sports ground with a rich history but also clearly deserving of a future … The one thing I do know all about is that former grounds still have a life after the last football has been kicked.”