Britain’s Buried Past

Picture an ancient Roman town — cobbled streets, shops, and wells, located deep in the green pastures of the Northamptonshire woods. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? This remarkable past is being gradually pieced together thanks to an HS2 archaeological dig — one of the largest ever undertaken in Britain. More than 450,000 artefacts have been uncovered, ranging from Roman gladiator axes to Anglo-Saxon spindle whorls, medieval dice, and even 19th-century gold dentures. These digs are fascinating attempts to learn more about the histories lying right beneath our feet.

The HS2 is a proposed high-speed railway line between London and the West Midlands, due to open around 2033. The initial archaeological investigations on the HS2 line began in 2018, and since then, nearly 1000 archaeologists have worked across 60 excavation sites on the route. Retrieving these ancient objects demands complex scientific and technological processes to ensure their protection and preservation. In 2009, archaeologists began using the Intrasis database and the Geographic Information System (GIS), marking a major technological innovation that enhanced the efficiency of existing methods. GIS is a digital tool for collecting and analysing spatial data linked to past human activity in a specific area. Archaeologists combine satellite imagery, aerial photography, topographical maps, and scans of the found artefacts to build 3D model visualisations of the excavation sites, helping them picture how ancient Roman communities once lived there. Further, the objects retrieved from the digs can be interpreted in 2D, 3D, and even 4D. This creates a virtual model for archaeologists to rotate and zoom into the artefact, finding patterns, textures, cracks, and curves not visible to the naked eye. GIS was also utilised for predictive modelling by analysing the site's spatial layout and finding nearby features, like water sources and elevation, to identify where further sites for excavation could be. GIS is also environmentally conscious, using non-destructive methods like drones to capture aerial and satellite photographs of the surrounding land.

The Intrasis technology is a specialised form of GIS used on the HS2 excavation site, specifically designed for cultural heritage protection in large environments. Critically, it contains a ‘graph view’ feature that allows archaeologists to visualise the relationship between objects found and specific environmental and topographical features, allowing them to picture how these objects were placed and used by ancient Romans. Intrasis also allows for the immense importation of files across multiple platforms. For instance, Word documents with information about Roman settlements, PDF files of forest pictures, and survey files from previous digs. These files are collated so archaeologists can ask questions such as what textual features typically belong to this era in pottery or approximately how many wells are expected in a town of this size? This strengthens GIS’s predictive power, providing archaeologists with detailed graphs and maps that highlight where certain objects are most likely to be found in an environment for further research.

“The fifth and sixth centuries are not ones we know a lot about, and all the objects we found will be able to tell us a lot about these people. It gives us a great snapshot of society. It is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.” This statement from Dr. Rachel Wood, lead archaeologist for Fusion JV, the primary company carrying out the fieldwork, demonstrates the importance of archaeology in unearthing the tales of our ancient societies. Stories of the many lives of men and women lost to history can now be retold, preserved in museums, and passed on to future generations. It is inspiring to see how scientific and archaeological fields can help historians in their search for greater understanding of human origins and our development.

Image from Wikimedia Commons