I love thinking about the past. I don’t really know why that is. It’s been with me ever since I was a young child. I remember reading magazines about the ancient Greeks and Romans, English history, and particularly the history of the Middle East.
In my part of the world, we’re lucky to have a long, long thread of history, running back many thousands of years. Literally miles from my house is a place where some of the oldest remains of dwellings in Europe have been found. It was in a time where the seas were in different places, and you could walk from England to Germany without getting your feet wet.
This year I’ve been involved in a variety of archaeological digs. A huge Roman fort on the east coast of England, a local site of local interest only, and today… trying to figure out what was going on a few thousand years ago in a nearby field.
Like just about every walk of life, archaeology has been revolutionised by technology. It’s still a discipline which uses the shovel, brush and trowel to carefully scrape away the soil and reveal the mundane, and sometimes, the extraordinary.
Today there was not a shovel or trowel in sight / on site. Instead we used a rather ‘homemade’ looking trolley which allowed us to wheel about some ‘ground penetrating radar’ equipment. This allows archaeologists to see things without having to dig them up. Patterns are revealed, walls and ditches come to light. Diggers of the future can use this information to target their work with far greater accuracy.
It’s strange going out with no intention of discovering anything. You turn on the equipment, push the trolley, travel in as straight a line as you can manage, then turn around and walk back parallel to where you were moments ago.
I’m told that the GPS unit mounted on the trolley is accurate to within 2cm, and that the radar signals, once they’ve been processed this evening, will be able to detect all manner of objects in the ground, and serve them up in a 2D image.
We walked many, many miles. We were battered by the wind. We talked a lot. We wore (and carried) no metal. We gathered data. Data that one day will add to the historical record, so that future generations can decide where to place their shoves and trowels.
My curiosity of the past just collided with my curiosity of technology. How wonderful.
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