Digging up the past with new technology

Julian Richards is probably most famous as the affable host of the BBC2 Meet the Ancestors, which sought to bring us face to face with our earliest descendants, through careful excavation of their remains and reconstruction of their faces. It offered a compelling glimpse in to the past.

After leaving school Julian took part on a number of digs around his native Nottingham, before securing a place Reading University where he became fascinated with our pre-history.

Since 1975 he has worked as a professional archaeologist, first for Berkshire Archaeological Unit, surveying the Berkshire Downs, and then for Wessex Archaeology running the Stonehenge Environs Project, studying the monument and the landscape.

After starting for English Heritage on their Monuments Protection Program, he found himself drawn into broadcasting. He spoke (kindly and slowly) to PC Site® down the phone from his rural Dorset home, and put up with our ignorance of history pre-Microsoft.

How has computer technology changed archaeology since you started?

“It’s difficult to think back that far [laughs]. From a personal point of view some of the really important developments have been in communication and publishing.

I mean I think about it now – how did we ever get reports finished when drawings were done by hand, and correction was done by tipp-ex? You had to send stuff off by post to get other people’s comments on it. Whereas now you have digital photographs, emailing and word-processing.

One of the best things is I can sit here in my home in rural Dorset, and carry out research online whereas before I would have had to go to the nearest academic library to research.

I can also connect with so many like minded people – a whole community out there.

On a practical level you’ll never get away from the fact that archaeology involves digging with spades and trowels, but computer technology means that while 30 years ago recording on a site was done manually now most of it can be done digitally.

For me as well, because I often do a lot of burial archaeology, it means you can take a digital image with reference points rather than standing there with a pencil and a sheet of permatrace in the rain.

The advances in remote sensing have been amazing, geophysics barely existed when I started, yet now we can find out an awful lot about a site before we even dig. It’s a huge advance from working off an aerial photograph, plotting a site and hoping that your trench would be in the right place, to being very confident that you know the detailed layout of the site before you even touch the soil.”

What have been the most important new technologies in archaeology – I’m thinking of Time Team kind of geophysics ?

“Well magnetometry, resistivity, ground penetrating radar (GPR), they’re all forms of non-invasive survey along with examining the chemical or magnetic properties of the soil itself.

GPR will scan through tarmac for example, whereas lot of technology will only work on fairly undisturbed ground.

It’s incredibly useful in determining the layout and structure of a site. For example, if it shows that you have a ditched compound with four houses inside it, then perhaps you only need to dig the one house – sample the site, dig the minimum needed and leave the rest for future generations.

In the 1920s and 1930s they would dig the whole thing which is incredibly frustrating because we can’t go back and reinterpret it, and we have to rely on their notes, which aren’t necessarily that good.”

Are advances in tech, especially around 3D reconstructions good for telling the story?

“Yes and this is something I’m really passionate about, archaeologists need to tell stories. We obviously have to write reports for our fellow archaeologists, but we also need to engage with the public, make what we’ve found understandable to everyone. If we don’t do this, don’t engage then we’re missing a trick, and how can we expect people to be interested in the past.

So reconstructing buildings that you can swoop through, or on a more human scale building a face from a skull, makes it more about people, our ancestors from hundreds or thousands of years ago.

[Face modelling] has come on in leaps and bounds, we started Ancestors back in 1998 and the development in technology over the seven years it ran was amazing.”

Tell us about radio carbon dating?

An area of big development has been radio carbon dating; it’s been around for almost fifty, sixty years. You used to need large samples, and your results weren’t that accurate, now you can have tiny samples and get quite narrow results from them. You can even send the sample to New Zealand and get the result in a few weeks.

The really exciting development is in the analysis of isotopes, lead, strontium and oxygen isotopes that get trapped, especially in teeth and bones and can tell you where a person or an animal grew up. You do it by comparing what’s in the teeth to the surrounding geology.

If there’s a burial found in a chalk area, that’s a very young rock, but teeth show isotopes from an old hard rock, granite for example, then you can suggest that the person may have been born in somewhere like Wales or Cornwall – or even further afield.

There are maps of Europe being built up overlaying the patterns of all these isotopes so we can narrow down further and further where people come from.

Say you previously had a burial [in the UK] with a pot from the Rhineland; is he a man with an interesting, imported pot or is he from somewhere else?

There’s the Amesbury Archer, a man buried near Stonehenge over 4000 years ago with lots of fancy stuff, gold and copper and even a small metal working anvil. We think he was probably a metalworker and thanks to isotope analysis we now know he comes from Switzerland. Making this extensive journey over 4,000 years ago, he’s a travelling salesman with this shiny stuff no-one’s ever seen before.

Through these techniques we can find out how ideas like metalworking are spreading across the continent and into Britain, it’s vital because in ancient archaeology, pre-Roman, there’s no historic records.

How to get into archaeology

If you want to take up archaeology as a profession then you will probably eventually have to go to university, but even if you just want to take it up as a hobby then a good way to start is to volunteer on a dig. One of the best ways to do this is to join the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), who have local groups all over the country. So get involved. It’s fun!

Check out .Julian’s website for details.

Main Image Credit: Adam Stanford, aerial cam.