Geoarchaeology and Industrial Sites

Industrial sites are those that contain evidence for the production of materials or objects within the archaeological record. Historic England (2018, 2) providess a definition for early industry as “production for trade, rather than for local domestic use….” This definition is broadly followed for this entry, which considers the geoarchaeological investigations of production beyond the needs of the local and every day. It thus facilitates a discussion of production across the archaeological record because, over time, the scales of industrial sites increase in both size and complexity. The range of geoarchaeological methods used to investigate such industrial sites is also highly variable, ranging from the geophysical depth modelling of technological deposits at wider site-landscape scales, through to thin section and geochemical analyses of deposit sequences at the micro-scale.