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Some thoughts on the monitoring and preservation of waterlogged archaeological sites in eastern England

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

French, CAI 

Abstract

This study reviews five hydrological monitoring projects used on archeological sites in the waterlogged landscapes of fenland East Anglia and east Yorkshire in England. The project design, recorded variables, and implications of each are discussed. In particular, the importance of understanding the landscape context is paramount, and retrieving an appropriate dataset over a sufficiently lengthy period of time to obtain reliable results and predictability. Some of the lessons learnt and outstanding problems are explored. As former wetlands are fast disappearing around the world through dewatering and a host of wider development threats such as urbanization and gravel extraction, the low intrusion suite of methods described here for measuring the degree and certainty of organic preservation is doubly important for establishing the viability of preservation in situ schemes for waterlogged archeological sites. This is crucial to get right, as wetland archeological records are an irreplaceable resource which offer extraordinarily full and diverse datasets of human lifeways which are all too often either poorly preserved or erroneously interpreted because of the skewed datasets recovered from dryland sites.

Description

Keywords

hydrological monitoring, context, organic remains, groundwater, soil moisture, redox

Journal Title

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2049-1948
2049-1948

Volume Title

4

Publisher

Wiley
Sponsorship
English Heritage, Huntings Technical Services (for Over), ARC (Central) Ltd. (for Etton), Hanson Building Products and SLR Consulting Ltd. (for Must Farm), the Society of Antiquaries and Fenland Archaeological Trust (for Etton), Cambridge Archaeological Unit (for Over and Must Farm), the McBurney Laboratory and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge (for Over and Must Farm), the Department of Archaeology, University of York and the European Research Council (for Star Carr), and the Meteorological Office (for Etton and Over)