ARS Ltd presents discussion around innovative Geochemical survey at CIfA conference

At this years’ CIfA annual conference ARS Ltd’s Roger Doonan and Clive Waddington, along with colleague Jay Carver (4AD consultants), discussed landscape-scale archaeological evaluation in the light of our recent innovations with geochemical survey. Geochemical prospection has been revolutionised in recent years with the ability to undertake rapid analyses in-situ that can provide the archaeologist with almost instant insight into the chemical variation across landscapes, sites and features. It has long been established that human activity imprints contexts with a chemical signature and it is now possible for archaeologists to use these signatures to establish, in combination with other evaluation techniques, the presence of a wide range of buried archaeological remains including ‘difficult to find’ archaeology and features that geophysics and aerial photography and evaluation trenching sampling rarely recognise.