The nature of ancient history: investigating ancient sites and sources

Course note: this hub uses the option 'The investigation of ancient sites and sources', one of five Nature of ancient history options. Schools choose their own options, and Year 11 choices must not significantly overlap the options a student will take in Year 12 Ancient History or History Extension, so check your school's program.

Investigating ancient sites has changed from treasure-seeking to systematic, recorded science. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many excavators were antiquarians or agents of collectors and museums. At Nimrud and Nineveh in the 1840s Austen Henry Layard uncovered carved palace reliefs, most of which are now in the British Museum. Heinrich Schliemann cut a great trench through the mound at Hisarlik in the 1870s while searching for Homer's Troy, destroying later layers to reach the level he expected.

Such work recovered spectacular objects but recorded little about where they lay.

From the late nineteenth century, Augustus Pitt-Rivers and Flinders Petrie insisted that every find, including pottery sherds and small objects, be recorded and published. Petrie developed sequence dating (seriation) from changes in pottery styles. In the twentieth century Mortimer Wheeler and Kathleen Kenyon dug grid-based box trenches with standing baulks so that the stratigraphy, the sequence of layers, could be read in section.

Later, open-area excavation and single-context recording, summarised in a Harris matrix, allowed archaeologists to trace each deposit's relationship to others.

Methods of analysis changed even more. Radiocarbon dating, developed in the late 1940s, measures the decay of carbon-14 in once-living material; dendrochronology dates timber from tree-ring patterns; thermoluminescence can date fired ceramics. Isotope analysis of bones can reveal diet and migration, and ancient DNA can be compared with that of other ancient and modern populations.

Recording now uses total stations, GIS databases, photogrammetry (3D models built from overlapping photographs), drones and LiDAR, while magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar map buried features without digging. Continuity remains: excavation still depends on careful observation of context, and every excavation destroys the deposits it records.