UK: WROXETER: BURIED ROMAN CITY DISCOVERED

Описание: (2 Aug 1995) English/Nat

Archaeologists in Britain have uncovered a Roman city the size of Pompei without lifting a trowel.

The archaeologists may live in the world of the past but they've enlisted the latest technology to look beneath the soil.

It took thirty years to uncover this much of the roman town of Wroxeter.

But in the fields beyond, there remains a Roman city, hidden from view underneath the pastures and hedgerows.

It might have remained like that forever if Birmingham University's archaeologists hadn't called in cutting edge technology to uncover history's secret.

This machine tests electrical resistance in the ground. When a building lies beneath the earth, the machine registers a different reading compared to the soil around it.

The archaeologists are also using magnetometry, radar, and aerial scanning.

These pictures show a building that goes round a courtyard. The results of different methods are compared on the computer.

This aerial scan revealed a Roman villa with its own private road.

Even so, sometimes technology can take a back seat to more traditional methods.

A recent dry spell left the ground so parched that the town began to reveal itself. The yellow strips on the earth mark Roman roads lying several feet below the earth's surface.

SOUNDBITE:

We have four or five techniques at the same area. We are going to process these using the computer, using mathematical techniques, to find out which of them actually gives us which information. That will be useful for archaeologists anywhere in the world
SUPER CAPTION: Martijn Van Leusen, Birmingham University

The team is sharing their discoveries with others on the Internet. This is an artist's impression of the site before the new research, showing a sleepy town. New drawings will show a thriving city.

SOUNDBITE:

The bit immediately behind took thirty years of concentrated digging just to do this one concentrated tiny part of the town. If we wanted to do the whole lot it would take us a couple of hundred years, hundreds of people and a budget that we just couldn't comprehend, no way we could get it.
SUPER CAPTION: Roger White, Wroxeter Project Archaeologist

Technology cannot replace more traditional archeology altogether. But as this project is showing, it's a cheaper, quicker way of finding out what treasure the earth maybe hiding.

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