The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 2 • Ian Ralston and John Hunter
Figure 1.1 The recording of military monuments. Remains from the Second World War now fall within
the recognized scope of archaeology. Military remains at Brockhill, Redditch, Worcestershire.
Source: Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit
DEVELOPING SCIENCES
There have also been radical changes in the development and sophistication of scientific method
and in the intellectual climate in which archaeology has been conducted since the end of the
1940s. New techniques and their routine application have made significant contributions, for
example to the understanding of previous environments and subsistence regimes, to sourcing
the raw materials from which artefacts were made, and to providing absolute dates for
archaeological materials. Many techniques are now exercised routinely, and archaeology continues
to draw extensively on other areas of expertise, often in the creation of sub-disciplines that have
now evolved in their own right, such as palaeobotany and osteoarchaeology. These new approaches
and developments are not in themselves a principal concern in this volume and can be well
pursued as individual features elsewhere (see, for example, Renfrew and Bahn 1996). They do,
however, reflect archaeology’s holistic nature and their results are incorporated in many ways in
the following chapters.
Dating
The issue of obtaining dates may stand as particularly symptomatic of the scale of changes since
the 1940s. The fixing of chronology has always been an archaeological preoccupation, and many
standard archaeological methods—from site stratigraphies to artefact typologies—contain amongst
their primary purposes the establishment of relative chronologies, i.e. the demonstration that
building A precedes building B, or that grave C is later than grave D. However, the approaches
available for providing absolute dates for archaeological materials immediately after the Second