Without Lifting a Shovel, Archaeologists Survey a Medieval Town in Britain
Without Lifting a Shovel, Archaeologists Survey a Medieval Town in Britain
By STEVEN ERLANGER DEC. 3, 2014
LONDON — Without any digging and using highly sophisticated sensors, British researchers have produced a detailed plan of an 11th-century town near Stonehenge that shows the locations of individual residential and industrial buildings, like kilns and furnaces.
At the juncture of two trading routes and the River Avon, the medieval town of Old Sarum, two miles north of the modern city of Salisbury, has been a prime focus for archaeological work and speculation, and is mentioned in some of the country’s earliest written records. The first signs of human habitation there date to 3000 B.C., and the site was later used by the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans, who built a moated castle on a hill there and a wall around it. During the Iron Age, the site was used as a fort.
The survey, by researchers at the University of Southampton, concentrated on the inner and outer baileys, or enclosed courtyards. It discovered a network of buildings surrounded by what were apparently large structures for defense, with open areas behind them, possibly for mustering resources or people, or as part of a circular route through the city.
Roughly oval in shape, it was also the site of an early cathedral, built by 1092, until another was consecrated on the site of New Sarum and the old one was destroyed in 1219. The ramparts of the fort and the earthen fortifications around it are visible today from a nearby highway.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/world/europe/without-lifting-a-shovel-archaeologists-survey-a-medieval-town-in-britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss