Fieldwalking Essay

794 Words4 Pages
Describe and explain how archaeologists organise and carry out the recovery of finds from the surface of fields Fieldwalking involves systematic collection of artefacts from the ploughsoil which might indicate human settlement. Based on the reasoning that material on the surface of the soil reflects buried remains. Also, if there is lots of a particular materials, such as building rubble or broken pottery, it enables specific sites such as buildings or kilns to be identified. It also helps identify areas of settlement or activity, such as hunting. The first step of fieldwalking is planning. To start with, you have to plan where you are going to fieldwalk. When you’ve decided, you will have to ask permission from the land owner to make sure they agree to let you. Then you’ll have to decide what you are going to collect and whose colleting what. To decide who will collect what items, it’s probably best to collect your volunteers then see how experience they are. The more experienced they are, the easier and quicker they will be able to find artefacts. They’ll be better looking at a bigger area of land as they know what they are looking for. The least experienced volunteers will be better only looking at a small area of and as they don’t know what they are looking for. To do fieldwalking, you will need specific equipment. You’ll be needing: tape measures, ranging poles, numbered flags, numbered bags, marking poles, clipboard and a map of the area you will be investigating. Also, you might need a GPS so you can find the exact location of where the artefacts were found so other archaeologists in the future can go and see where they were and check them out if they needed to. An example of this, is the Shapwick Project. The next step to fieldwalking is the carrying out. You will first take your map and see how big and area you will be investigating. Then you decide
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