Theme:
1. Artefacts, Buildings & Ecofacts
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Coring Is Not Boring! Drillings in Combination with Other Non or Minimal-Invasive Methods for Investigating Archaeological Monuments [COMFORT]
Content:
This session is dedicated to multi-method approaches in archaeological investigations, that involve the use of drilling. Especially monuments like fortifications with their often enormous rampart-and-ditch systems, terraces, slopes and thick occupation layers full of archaeological and biological relicts, but also burial mounds or settlement tells, offer the perfect playground for hand augering and mechanical coring. Quick and cheap, drillings serve as an endoscope into the past of such monuments. Drillings in modern times have become an omnipresent, but not en-vogue tool on excavations to verify geophysical results, to distinguish occupation phases, and to answer palaeo-environmental questions. Yet systematic coring strategies are lacking standards.
The often multi-layered cores may contain soil material and hence information about the entire life span of the monuments. They are used for dating hillforts and other monuments by radiocarbon analysis or micromorphological studies of the soil and the relicts it contains, which provide information about the age and function of the site and its parts. Combined with (p)XRF measurements or pollen and phytolyth analysis they add information about the environment and the human impact; susceptibility measurements and other geophysical methods help to understand the geomagnetic images or ERT and GPR data. Hence there is a bouquet of methods, which can be applied to drilling cores themselves to make them speak about the history of the site.
We invite archaeologists, soil scientists, geologists, and those from related disciplines to present their method and strategy of drillings used for investigating fortifications, burial mounds or settlement tells with massive earthen elements. Reports about technical challenges, problems, limitations or successful new ideas are welcome, as are presentations on best practice examples of different methods combined with drillings and especially the results we can gain from systematic interdisciplinary coring strategies.
Keywords:
drilling and coring, fortification, multi-method approaches, paleaoenvironmental studies, micromorphology
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
COMFORT
Main organiser:
Timo Ibsen (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Matija Črešnar (Slovenia) 2,3
Affiliations:
1. Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA)
2. Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (UL FA DA)
3. Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Archaeology (CIRA)
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT