1. THE ARCHAEOLOGY
COURSEBOOK
CHAPTER 1
ARCHAEOLOGICAL
RECONNAISSANCE

2. Methods
♦ Desktop study
♦ Surface survey
♦ Geophysical / geochemical survey
♦ Aerial survey
♦ Remote sensing
♦ Chance!
BUT…
Not everything is lost from view!

3. Sites that were never lost
♦ Pyramids at Giza
(But NOT the Sphinx!)
♦ Stonehenge

4. Sites found by chance
♦ Lascaux
♦ Altamira
♦ Otzi the Iceman
♦ Pete Marsh
♦ Xian

5. Historical Documents
♦ Legal documents
♦ Economic records
♦ Tax records
♦ Pictorial records
♦ Written accounts
♦ Archaeological
records & reports
♦ Oral accounts
♦ Maps

6. Legal Documents
♦ Records of ownership
♦ Anglo-Saxon charters
♦ Court orders
♦ Wills
♦ Inventories
Charter from King Eadwig granting forty hides
at Ely to Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, 957 AD.
(Bodleian Library, Oxford)

7. Economic Records
♦ Orders & sales lists
♦ Agent’s bills (e.g. estates)
♦ Directories of services
♦ Plans & Drafts
Original plans for Brunel's railway bridge at Windsor

8. Tax Records
♦ Linked to ownership
♦ Tithe awards
♦ Tax surveys
(e.g. Domesday Book)
Instructions for the collection of
“Domesday” returns i.e. taxes!

9. Pictorial Records
♦ Paintings
♦ Photographs
Turner’s
painting of
Stonehenge
(1825)

10. Pictorial Records
♦ Engravings
♦ Aerial Photographs
Boise, Idaho (USA), 1888
Durham
City, present
day

11. Written Accounts
♦ Descriptions of places
found in:
1. diaries
2. books
e.g. antiquarian work
Image of Stonehenge from
William Stukeley’s book
(1740)

12. Archaeological Records !
♦ Previous excavations & surveys
located in:
museums
libraries
SMRs
NMR

13. ARCHIVE PHOTOS: JERICHO

14. SCHEDULED MONUMENT

15. Oral Accounts
♦ From people living in the area
♦ Might know what has happened in the
relatively recent past
– knowledge of past visits by
anthropologists
– knowledge of past techniques and
working areas (e.g. pottery making)
– farmers’ knowledge of recently
ploughed areas
– knowledge of recent locations of
buildings

16. Maps
♦ One of the MOST important tools
♦ Used to examine and locate sites in the
landscape
 track changes through time
e.g. boundaries, land units, fields,
hedges

17. Regression using Maps
♦ Can work back from the oldest available
map
♦ Cross-reference historical sources and
fieldnames / place-names
 develop maps for periods prior to
mapping (e.g. Medieval period)

18. Early Maps
from 16th
Century
onwards
♦ Not always to
scale
♦ May include
visual aspects
e.g. illustrations
Engraved map of Hampshire, incl.
vignette of Southampton.
Thomas Moule,1845

19. Modern Ordnance Survey (OS)
Maps
♦ from 19th
Century onwards
♦ mapped each county at 1 inch to 1 mile
♦ give details of individual buildings
♦ developed use of grid system
♦ can use series of maps to see changes in land
use over time

20. Other Useful Maps
♦ High resolution
maps
- i.e. good scale
such as OS
1:25000 series
♦ Geological Maps
♦ Street maps
♦ Vegetation &
Climate maps
♦ Survey maps

21. Surface Survey
♦ fieldwalking
♦ surveying
♦ aerial photography
 recognise scatters
 develop contour maps
(can be densities of
pottery / lithics)
Dot density plot for
ceramics (each dot
equals 0.1 ceramic sherd
per field walking tract),
southern Romania.

22. Fieldwalking
♦ Surface collection
(US term)
♦ Systematic
collection of
artefacts
Decisions:
- collect all pieces?
- collect only diagnostic pieces?
- width of traverses / size of grids?

23. Pros & Cons of Fieldwalking
♦ Cheap!
♦ Quick and relatively easy
♦ Only useful on arable land (recently
ploughed)
♦ Results are only guidance (things
migrate)
♦ Differential collection / recognition by
different fieldwalkers

24. SURFACE SURVEY

25. Other Surface Survey Methods
♦ Shovel pit testing (taking regular buckets
of soil from test pits and sieving them)
♦ Coring (extract sample of subsoil
♦ Augering  snapshot of stratigraphy)
♦ Probing
Somewhat destructive & time-consuming!

26. TEST PITS

27. Geophysical & Geochemical
Methods
♦ Analysis of heavy metals and lipids in
topsoil (e.g. phosphates)
♦ Detection of magnetic & electrical
anomalies

28. GEOPHYSICS: FIELD
BOUNDARIES

29. MAQGNETOMETRY AT
ALFOLDEAN 2OO5

30. LONGBARROW: COMPARISON OF
RESISTIVITY AND MAGNETOMETRY

31. RESISTIVITY

32. RESISTIVITY AT
ALFOLDEAN

33. RESISTIVITY

34. MAGNETOMETRY AT
ALFOLDEAN

35. Resistivity Survey
♦ Pass an electrical charge
through the soil
♦ Measure differences in
conductance
More moisture 
greater conductivity
Buried ditch  usually
retains water  conducts
water better than
surrounding soil
Long
Barrow,
Gloucs
shows
flanking
ditches

36. Magnetometry
♦ Measures
local magnetic
distortions
♦ Can be due to:
 digging of pits
(in-fill will have
different
magnetic charge
than the subsoil)
 fires (kilns or
hearths reset the
magnetic field)

37. Aerial Survey
♦ Aerial
Photography
♦ from light
aircraft or
balloons
♦ verticals /
obliques
♦ cropmarks /
shadow sites /
soil colours
Barrow cemetery
(oblique, cropmarks),
Cavendish, Suffolk

38. AP OBLIQUE OF DMV

39. CROPMARKS

40. AP OBLIQUE OF
STONEHENGE

41. AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY
FROM A KITE

42. AP FROM A KITE

43. AP: ONE OF A STEREO
PAIR

44. Remote Sensing
♦ from non-ground
based methods
i.e. from planes
and satellites
♦ radar
♦ sonar
♦ thermal imaging
♦ infrared
photography
satellite image of the Heraklean
Peninsula, Ukraine

45. SATELLITE IMAGES

46. INFRARED PHOTOGRAPHY

48. GIS LANDSCAPE NET

49. Underwater Archaeology
♦ has its own set of techniques and
methods
e.g. Remotely Operated Vehicles
(ROVs)