It is the time of year when all of the fields are full of that annoying stuff called crops, so my options for survey are limited. I've been spending the time writing my book and being sociable for a change. Here is a small extract, musings on the subject of Landscape Geophysics.
Landscape
archaeology is the study of not just one site, but the way in which
peoples used and modified the environment around them. It uses a
multitude of techniques, such as remote sensing, geophysics,
environmental archaeology, excavation and bioarchaeology. This gives
a broad picture of land use rather than focusing on one particular
site. The usual course of events in archaeology usually involves
three steps.
1)
Exploration. Finding a site by methods such as remote sensing, metal
detecting or looking for pottery scatters.
2) Survey.
Study of the site by fieldwalking, geophysics and earthwork survey.
3)
Excavation. Answering specific questions about the site by targeting
excavations to answer them.
The problem
I have found is with the third part. It takes an awful lot of time and
effort to excavate and publish a site, even if the excavated areas
are quite small. There are pros and cons to excavation. A site that
would take a couple of weeks to geophys might take about 200 years to
fully excavate if the same area was covered (not that you would want
to). Of course, excavation can provide a huge amount of information
about dating, phasing and the use of the site, whereas geophysics
will only give you a basic layout. The pay-off comes when
you survey a site and move on to the next. Rather than digging that
site for the next 20 years, you could survey hundreds of sites in
that time, building up basic information on a huge area. This enables
the study of a landscape that the time restrictions of excavation
would not allow, and this is the method I have chosen to study the
Roman road network.
Roman roads
and their associated settlements show up well using geophysics. It is
a landscape that is being ploughed away. It will not be there
forever. By studying as wide an area as possible, not only will the
limited information that geophysics provides be available long after
the site is destroyed, but it offers the chance to save such sites
using schemes such as Higher Level Stewardship. The study of the road
network itself gives a better understanding of what the Romans were
trying to achieve in their occupation, giving the basic layout of
their entire infrastructure. It is archaeology on a large scale.
Where you lose the finer detail, you gain a much broader picture of
what is going on. That is what I like to call Landscape Geophysics.
I am not for
a moment suggesting that excavation is bad. I am saying that the two
methods are complementary, and a greater balance between the two
would benefit archaeology as a whole.
