Remote and near surface sensing data are widely used in archaeology and heritage management for feature discovery, change detection and monitoring, as an input to predictive modelling, and in the ...planning process. While global and regional datasets are widely used for some purposes, data are regularly acquired specifically for archaeological projects because of the very high spatial resolution required for feature detection and assessments of archaeological significance and the need for data on subsurface features. The sensing data collected for archaeology cover limited areas and only a few types of sensors, known to produce data efficiently, are regularly employed. Precision agriculture is beginning to produce large quantities of varied sensing data across extensive landscape areas. This situation creates an opportunity to adapt and reuse precision agricultural data for archaeology and heritage work, extending covering and enhancing our understanding of archaeology in contemporary agricultural landscapes. Equally, there is potential for coordinated data collection, collecting data once for multiple applications, and to add value through analyses which bring together perspectives from multiple related domains to model long-term processes in anthropogenic soil systems. This article provides a high-level overview of policy and technological developments which create the potential for sensing data reuse, coordinated data collection, and collaborative analyses across archaeological, agricultural, and agri-environmental applications while underscoring the structural barriers which, at present, constrain this potential. It highlights examples where the development of interoperable data and workflows can promote tighter integration of archaeology and cultural heritage management with sustainable agricultural land management and support integrated decision making.
The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site is a landscape defined by change and process. As such, the approach to its heritage must be similarly flexible and active. A balance must be found between ...celebrating these processes of change, whilst also conserving those invaluable discoveries and features that so define this coast, as well as encouraging ongoing research and public engagement. This delicate task can be aided firstly by thinking about this geologically defined World Heritage Site as a landscape. In this way it is possible to develop rich and nuanced narratives between the human and geological. Secondly, by embracing new technologies and methodologies to record, archive and communicate features and finds, as well as the process of change itself. Here, we explore these ideas through two unique sites of geological and palaeontological interest discovered in the process of quarrying. To balance keeping the sites open to the public with the risk of natural and human damage to the sites, Structure-from-Motion photogrammetry was used to create accurate, high-resolution, georeferenced 3D models. The process and potentials of the technique are discussed, alongside a discussion of the broader ideas of heritage and approaches already at play on this coastline.
The history of the British Isles and Ireland is characterized by multiple periods of major cultural change, including the influential transformation after the end of Roman rule, which precipitated ...shifts in language, settlement patterns and material culture
. The extent to which migration from continental Europe mediated these transitions is a matter of long-standing debate
. Here we study genome-wide ancient DNA from 460 medieval northwestern Europeans-including 278 individuals from England-alongside archaeological data, to infer contemporary population dynamics. We identify a substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in early medieval England, which is closely related to the early medieval and present-day inhabitants of Germany and Denmark, implying large-scale substantial migration across the North Sea into Britain during the Early Middle Ages. As a result, the individuals who we analysed from eastern England derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the continental North Sea zone, albeit with substantial regional variation and heterogeneity within sites. We show that women with immigrant ancestry were more often furnished with grave goods than women with local ancestry, whereas men with weapons were as likely not to be of immigrant ancestry. A comparison with present-day Britain indicates that subsequent demographic events reduced the fraction of continental northern European ancestry while introducing further ancestry components into the English gene pool, including substantial southwestern European ancestry most closely related to that seen in Iron Age France
.
Orkney was a major cultural center during the Neolithic, 3800 to 2500 BC. Farming flourished, permanent stone settlements and chambered tombs were constructed, and long-range contacts were sustained. ...From ∼3200 BC, the number, density, and extravagance of settlements increased, and new ceremonial monuments and ceramic styles, possibly originating in Orkney, spread across Britain and Ireland. By ∼2800 BC, this phenomenon was waning, although Neolithic traditions persisted to at least 2500 BC. Unlike elsewhere in Britain, there is little material evidence to suggest a Beaker presence, suggesting that Orkney may have developed along an insular trajectory during the second millennium BC. We tested this by comparing new genomic evidence from 22 Bronze Age and 3 Iron Age burials in northwest Orkney with Neolithic burials from across the archipelago. We identified signals of inward migration on a scale unsuspected from the archaeological record: As elsewhere in Bronze Age Britain, much of the population displayed significant genome-wide ancestry deriving ultimately from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. However, uniquely in northern and central Europe, most of the male lineages were inherited from the local Neolithic. This suggests that some male descendants of Neolithic Orkney may have remained distinct well into the Bronze Age, although there are signs that this had dwindled by the Iron Age. Furthermore, although the majority of mitochondrial DNA lineages evidently arrived afresh with the Bronze Age, we also find evidence for continuity in the female line of descent from Mesolithic Britain into the Bronze Age and even to the present day.
Reading the Gosforth Cross Roger Lang; Dominic Powlesland
Digging into the Dark Ages,
02/2020
Book Chapter
This chapter describes and reflects on a Royal Society for Arts Fellowship project that created lesson resources using early medieval stone sculpture, to enrich the view of the Viking Age found in ...the primary stage 2014 English National Curriculum. To this end, the project produced the first 3D scan of arguably the single most important free-standing stone cross of the Anglo-Scandinavian period from England: the Gosforth Cross. The model was made freely available online. Also, the model was deployed in films designed to present the way the original 10th-century viewers might have understood the markings on the cross, and to
The excavation of the Early Anglo-Saxon or Anglian Settlement at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire, between 1986 and 1995, represents one of the largest excavations conducted in Britain in the last two ...decades. The project, funded by English Heritage, combined the fundamental needs of rescue and research archaeology. The excavation has produced a wealth of new evidence which is forcing us to re-evaluate much that has been said about the formative period of the English nation.
This paper results from three small excavations undertaken when much of the agricultural land in large parts of England was inaccessible for fieldwork owing to restrictions related to foot and mouth ...disease. The objectives of the DigIt project were twofold - to examine groups of features identified through remote sensing, in this case primarily geomagnetic survey and air photography, and to examine through experimentation a range of digital recording techniques applied in archaeological excavation. The excavation objectives were in part unusual as they were focussed not only on excavating large areas with many features but also on trying to assess the condition of the archaeological deposits, which had formerly been protected by blown sand. Recent ploughing was shown to be aggressively truncating the buried deposits in one area, just starting to erode them in another, but causing minimal impact in the third. The opportunity to examine the blown sand itself in minute detail revealed a stratigraphic and chronological sequence which was only visible in the three dimensional distribution of tiny fragments of material. The excavation assessment is supported by specialist assessments of the environmental evidence and the Anglo-Saxon ceramics. The excavation confirmed the interpretation of some magnetic anomalies as Grubenhäuser, which were directly comparable with those excavated at West Heslerton 2.5km to the west; however, it failed to conclusively resolve the nature and purpose of the hundreds of small ring ditches termed 'barrowlets', revealed along 8km of geophysical survey, although evidence hints at their function as cremation burial sites. It also confirmed the presence of preserved and intact surface deposits associated with a segment of Iron Age and Roman 'ladder settlement' where they had been sealed by blown sands. The Landscape Research Centre (LRC) had been pioneering the use of hand-held computers and other tools within a primarily digital recording system for more than 15 years and this project provided an opportunity, through a collaboration with the English Heritage Centre for Field Archaeology, to test a full range of digital recording techniques employing more up to date technology than had been used in the past. If this experiment deploying different technologies was to be of any value then it was important that they were tested in a normal environment and thus this article combines both the excavation assessment report and discussion of the digital recording approaches and, where these were fit for purpose, uses them to support the needs of archaeological documentation and excavation objectives. The context of the work within the LRC's established methods and philosophy with regard to excavation recording is discussed and reviewed with reference to changes in the available technology.
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