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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/17/hot-summer-archaeologists-forgotten-gems
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| A long, hot summer always raises the pulses of archaeologists | A long, hot summer always raises the pulses of archaeologists |
| (15 days later) | |
| We buckle in, the engine roars to life, and we begin creeping across the airfield; wings wobble alarmingly with acceleration, then that stomach-dropping lurch pulls us away from the ground. Rising skywards, nervousness distils to anticipation for the priceless views of the great Clun-Clee ridgeway in south-west Shropshire. It’s 2003, deep in AE Housman country and my first experience of aerial archaeology. My undergraduate dissertation was exploring the meagre record for the last prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the region, and I wanted to see the lie of the land. Flying over swelling hills I’d pored over in cartographic form and trudged across on foot was exhilarating, even though we didn’t discover any new sites that year. | We buckle in, the engine roars to life, and we begin creeping across the airfield; wings wobble alarmingly with acceleration, then that stomach-dropping lurch pulls us away from the ground. Rising skywards, nervousness distils to anticipation for the priceless views of the great Clun-Clee ridgeway in south-west Shropshire. It’s 2003, deep in AE Housman country and my first experience of aerial archaeology. My undergraduate dissertation was exploring the meagre record for the last prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the region, and I wanted to see the lie of the land. Flying over swelling hills I’d pored over in cartographic form and trudged across on foot was exhilarating, even though we didn’t discover any new sites that year. |
| If we’d gone up this summer, it might have been a different story. Right across the country, hundreds of archaeological sites are literally transpiring from the soil, as grass and crops become desiccated after months without rain. Deeper soils hold on to moisture longer, so plants growing over buried features such as ditches, walls or even old flowerbeds will dry out at different rates. Archaeologists have quietly spent decades developing a whole gamut of “remote-sensing” methods that allow us to visualise the skin-thin layer of sediments covering Britain’s bedrock. Its wrinkles and lumps contain our deep history written across fields, meadows and hills. | If we’d gone up this summer, it might have been a different story. Right across the country, hundreds of archaeological sites are literally transpiring from the soil, as grass and crops become desiccated after months without rain. Deeper soils hold on to moisture longer, so plants growing over buried features such as ditches, walls or even old flowerbeds will dry out at different rates. Archaeologists have quietly spent decades developing a whole gamut of “remote-sensing” methods that allow us to visualise the skin-thin layer of sediments covering Britain’s bedrock. Its wrinkles and lumps contain our deep history written across fields, meadows and hills. |
| 'Millennia of human activity': heatwave reveals lost UK archaeological sites | 'Millennia of human activity': heatwave reveals lost UK archaeological sites |
| We can detect the subtle changes in topography that mark eroded remnants of ancient landscapes with hi-tech methods, ranging from thermal mapping to laser scanning, against which even thick conifer forest is no match. Yet despite all this, sometimes nothing at all is visible under normal conditions. It’s only during severe droughts that sub-surface features reveal themselves as contrasting “parchmarks” in vegetation, offering a sort of full-wavelength time travel. Instead of tuning into one chronological frequency, many millennia materialise en masse; a choral motet of history whose notes are ordinarily shrouded beneath the soil. | We can detect the subtle changes in topography that mark eroded remnants of ancient landscapes with hi-tech methods, ranging from thermal mapping to laser scanning, against which even thick conifer forest is no match. Yet despite all this, sometimes nothing at all is visible under normal conditions. It’s only during severe droughts that sub-surface features reveal themselves as contrasting “parchmarks” in vegetation, offering a sort of full-wavelength time travel. Instead of tuning into one chronological frequency, many millennia materialise en masse; a choral motet of history whose notes are ordinarily shrouded beneath the soil. |
| Farmers and wildlife have been suffering hardship during the hot and dry summer, but archaeologists are dealing with a bumper crop of ancient markings revealing in astonishing detail just how much lies under our feet. Parchmarks can show normally hidden surroundings at existing sites, from once-fashionable garden designs to long-levelled outbuildings. But they are also famous for “unknown unknowns”: features that have never been seen until someone flies over a particular field during a dry spell. Sometimes their form gives them away: Roman forts tend to be square with rounded corners, while some iron age settlements have distinctive banjo-shaped outlines. Confirmation needs ground-truthing, which might come far in the future, but the ability to map sites not only gives us more historical information, it also records our heritage for protection. | Farmers and wildlife have been suffering hardship during the hot and dry summer, but archaeologists are dealing with a bumper crop of ancient markings revealing in astonishing detail just how much lies under our feet. Parchmarks can show normally hidden surroundings at existing sites, from once-fashionable garden designs to long-levelled outbuildings. But they are also famous for “unknown unknowns”: features that have never been seen until someone flies over a particular field during a dry spell. Sometimes their form gives them away: Roman forts tend to be square with rounded corners, while some iron age settlements have distinctive banjo-shaped outlines. Confirmation needs ground-truthing, which might come far in the future, but the ability to map sites not only gives us more historical information, it also records our heritage for protection. |
| And it’s not just constructions that are manifesting themselves. The aridity of wilting leaves is inverted as once-vanished landforms revive: ghosts of hedgerows mark where butterflies flitted and nestlings hid, showing how our fields used to be on a smaller, more wildlife-friendly scale just a few decades ago. Across the floodplains, vanished ribbons of streams are arrayed across the land, taunting today’s corseted, managed rivers, and reminding us that elemental forces can rise again. | And it’s not just constructions that are manifesting themselves. The aridity of wilting leaves is inverted as once-vanished landforms revive: ghosts of hedgerows mark where butterflies flitted and nestlings hid, showing how our fields used to be on a smaller, more wildlife-friendly scale just a few decades ago. Across the floodplains, vanished ribbons of streams are arrayed across the land, taunting today’s corseted, managed rivers, and reminding us that elemental forces can rise again. |
| The heatwave seven years ago led to more than a thousand new sites being found. This summer – the most prolonged drought since the 1970s – promises to be even more fruitful, and aerial discoveries right now are stratospheric, thanks to pilots in cockpits, as well as at the controls of drones: the newest kit in the toolbox for archaeologists. | The heatwave seven years ago led to more than a thousand new sites being found. This summer – the most prolonged drought since the 1970s – promises to be even more fruitful, and aerial discoveries right now are stratospheric, thanks to pilots in cockpits, as well as at the controls of drones: the newest kit in the toolbox for archaeologists. |
| Dig under way to reveal ruins of medieval castle in Sheffield | Dig under way to reveal ruins of medieval castle in Sheffield |
| These ancient apparitions across the country are exciting yet strangely unsettling, dragging us out of our temporal bubble like some gigantic augmented reality overlay. Spectral pleasure gardens where silken skirts dragged (and servants snatched a rest) loom in front of great houses, only their windows remembering the view. Out in the fields, harvesters gathering crops travel over abraded burial mounds, encircling millennia-old bones and ashes. And those extinct watercourses rippling up through dry pasture were the veins of a once wild land – the routeways Britain’s hunter-gatherers knew. | These ancient apparitions across the country are exciting yet strangely unsettling, dragging us out of our temporal bubble like some gigantic augmented reality overlay. Spectral pleasure gardens where silken skirts dragged (and servants snatched a rest) loom in front of great houses, only their windows remembering the view. Out in the fields, harvesters gathering crops travel over abraded burial mounds, encircling millennia-old bones and ashes. And those extinct watercourses rippling up through dry pasture were the veins of a once wild land – the routeways Britain’s hunter-gatherers knew. |
| The parchmarks emerging remind us that most human life, love and toil in this land has been forgotten: not castles or stone circles, but age on age of the small things, hidden places, lost pathways. Archaeology connects us – if only for a long, hot season – with an entire world beyond memory. | The parchmarks emerging remind us that most human life, love and toil in this land has been forgotten: not castles or stone circles, but age on age of the small things, hidden places, lost pathways. Archaeology connects us – if only for a long, hot season – with an entire world beyond memory. |
| • Becky Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist based in north Wales, co-founder of TrowelBlazers, and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, to be published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2019 | • Becky Wragg Sykes is an archaeologist based in north Wales, co-founder of TrowelBlazers, and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, to be published by Bloomsbury Sigma in 2019 |
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