Whilst Archaeology Is All About Digging Up The Past, The Use Of Modern Machines Can Help To Make Some Of The More Complex Tasks Much More Straightforward To Carry Out
For many years I have been fascinated by history and archaeology and over the decades I have enjoyed numerous hours looking around heritage properties, reading lots of books and magazines referencing the subject and sometimes being fortunate enough to go and see recent archaeological excavations.
My passion for archaeology was influenced by a relation who, even whilst doing a very responsible job with a global business, made the decision to complete a degree in the subject in his spare time. I was somewhat in awe of this relation when I was small and so I tried to know more about the things that they were interested in.
I live near the route of one of the big Roman roads through England and at a time when construction was going on to widen the present day motorway which follows the same route, archaeologists unearthed the remains of a Roman fort just half a mile from my house. I was absolutely fascinated by the very concept, despite the fact that the excavation was a highly uninspiring hole in the corner of a farmer’s field, where my siblings and I had picked our own strawberries a year or two before.
Once the dig had been finished off, the major finds recorded and the dig written up, my relation was given permission to take me onto the site and let me have a look about and see if I could find anything. It was a fabulous experience as a child to be able to view the stratigraphy of the excavation and to be able to dig a few items out of the many layers of occupation on the site. But at that time, there wasn’t really enough interest in sharing excavations like this with the public at large and so publications describing the site were written in academic terms and were totally impossible for a child, so I never truly got a feel of what the fort might have looked like, or what it would have been like to reside there.
I was reminded of this recently when viewing an episode of Time Team on television. I’m completely aware of how much developments in archaeological processes and much more general in the past have caused it to become much easier to enthuse about archaeology to the public and it’s pleasing to think that sciences like geophysics aren’t just the domain of people who have gone to university. But this particular episode of the series grabbed my attention more than usual.
The site being looked at was situated on particularly difficult terrain and a lot of the work was being carried out in trenches which were closer to vertical than horizontal. When trying to pull together the story of the site and why the focus had shifted from one area to another over the centuries, the archaeologists employed a piece of gear which could assess the whole site three dimensionally making use of a beam from a Laser eye.
We are all used to seeing lasers used in a lot of aspects of our lives, from barcode scanners, to DVD players, Laser eye surgery and laser light shows at events, but this technology is fabulous. It can be used to measure distances to or from any target position by sending out pulses from a Laser eye in the machine. These can be pointed at very exact points (as tiny as a pinhead if required) and the location of each point is passed back into a computer which gathers together all of the data. The operator can then utilise software to build a three dimensional image of the area which has been viewed and can move that image to see the location from any position necessary.
On this occasion, the data was able to show that the castle which was being investigated had gradually become used less following the development of better fire power. Having firearms with a greater range meant that attackers on a nearby area of higher hills would have been able to do damage to the castle. And an accurate three dimensional picture of the site could demonstrate exactly that.
How superb it would have been if such technology had been available when I was a child. I could have found out what the building I had visited would have looked like, and where it was located in the settlement and the surrounding fields. The equipment is not only used in archaeology either – there are a lot of other uses for it too.
So the humble laser can be utilised for many things that we are beginning to count upon, such as shop scanners, CD players and Laser eye surgery, but from a personal point of view, I’m looking forward to seeing it used considerably more in archaeology in the hope that it can give us a much better picture of living in the past.
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