Archaeology at the University of Sheffield

Archaeology staff and students from the School of Biosciences and the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities have been at the Neolithic Salt conference in the North East this weekend. Our Archaeology and Heritage Science Facility Manager Yvette, presented the experimental archaeological reconstructions and analytical work she has done on the saltern on Saturday. Then on Sunday she conducted another experiment with help from Colin Merrony, students Becky Vickers and Steve Hollings and Archie from Whitby Sea Salt.
It was a great weekend and fantastic to see so many alumni too!

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Our international student, Congfei Shu, is conducting research on Gainsborough's Old Hall Gardens in partnership with English Heritage this summer.

She is using geophysical methods to identify potential evidence of past activity around the hall, such as former garden features, walls, buildings or, according to the locals, even a possible tunnel.

The initial results are looking promising, and we are eagerly awaiting the completion of her dissertation to see her final interpretation. Keep up the good work, Fei!

🧐 What’s that? 🧐

You may have spotted something taking place in our grounds over the last few weeks, that would be Fei, Andrés and members of the team from the Archaeology at the University of Sheffield department. They are completing geophysical surveys around the Hall as part of Fei’s master’s degree focusing on the parts of the building lost to time. If you spot them on your visit you’re more than welcome to chat with them and ask questions if they’re not too busy, it’s a really exciting project and we’re thrilled to have them on site.

For those wanting to know a little more about what ‘geophys’ is, one of our team has put together some useful information: -
“Ground Penetrating Radar surveys are used by archaeologists when they are investigating deep deposits with complex mixes of features. The Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) equipment sends short pulses of radio waves into the ground and some of the energy from these radio wave reflects off the boundaries between features such as structures and deposits. The time it takes a reflection to return to the equipment allows the depth of that feature to be calculated. The deeper the deposit the longer it takes the reflection to get back to the equipment. As the equipment is pushed across the ground it records a vertical slice of information. By stacking up lots of these vertical slices next to each other a 3-dimensional model of the buried deposits can be built up and then this can be shown as plans of the buried features at different depths by taking horizontal slices across this 3D model. These plan views are known as 'time slices' as they are made up of all the points from the various runs across the site which took the same time to reflect back up to the equipment, and so represent features at the same depth below the ground surface. The equipment is a cart which allows the GPR transmitter/receiver to skim across the ground surface and it looks a little like a large lawn mower. To use it, the cart is pushed to and fro across an area in the same sort of way a lawn mower might be.”

We have already seen one results image produced, and it was fascinating. As the project continues we will update you where we can, but most importantly we wish Fei good luck with her degree. ✨