Techniques > About the Guide
About the Guide to Underwater and Foreshore Archaeology
Techniques, Methods and Tools
Version date: 16 October 2016
- Index to the Guide
- Starting a shipwreck recording project
- Survey and recording types - Assessment / Recording / Monitoring
- Site types and recommended methods
Introduction
This is a Guide to the techniques, methods and tools used in archaeology fieldwork underwater and on the foreshore. The content is based on more than 20 years experience working on fieldwork projects all over the world backed up with research into the effectiveness and accuracy of some of these techniques.
The guide has been deliberately designed so that it defines how to undertake survey and recording tasks. For those new to the field this makes it easy to implement by simply following the guide and those with different experiences can adapt the guide as they wish. The Guide will develop and adapt over time so please send suggestions for better ways to record archaeological sites.
This guide shares some similarities with the handbook Underwater Archaeology, the NAS Guide to Principles and Practice [1] as the section on surveying in that book was written by Peter Holt. The book was published some years ago, the text written some years before that and more research has been done since then, so the recommendation in this online Guide supercede those in the NAS handbook. The contents of this Guide were originally to have been published in a book but it was decided to publish as a web site as it can be read for free, it is more widely available and it can be easily updated. Changes and additions to the Guide are listed in the Updates page.
The guide deliberately showcases instruments of specific types and from particular manufacturers as they have been shown to work reliably in the field. In most cases the results of the experiments have been included where one particular type has been shown to be better.
The contents of the Guide have evolved over many years involving a lot of fieldwork and some interesting experiments, but much has also come from discussions with people who were interested in how we do fieldwork and how we can do it better. The list is too long to mention them all but I am particularly grateful to Kevin Camidge, Paul Dart, Martin Dean, Jeremy Green, Alex Hildred, Gwyn Jones, Nigel Kelland, Nic Rule and Chris Underwood. In recent years a lot of the research and fieldwork included in this guide has been done as part of the SHIPS Project in Plymouth and as part of project work with MSc Hydrography students at Plymouth University.
Much of this research has been done on projects funded by the US research foundation ProMare, so special thanks go to them for providing the funding and encouragement for this work.
[1] Bowen A. (Ed.), 2009, Underwater Archaeology, the NAS Guide to Principles and Practice, Nautical Archaeology Society, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4051-7592-0
Referencing
- Name - A Guide to Underwater and Foreshore Archaeology: Techniques, Methods and Tools
- Author - Peter Holt
- Date - check the Updates page for the version date
- Publisher - 3H Consulting Ltd., Plymouth, UK
- Link - http://www.3hconsulting.com/techniques.html