Abstract
In England since 1990 developers have been required to consider the impact of proposed developments on archaeological sites. As the knowledge of the presence, extent, nature, and significance of any archaeology within an area proposed for development is often potentially unknown, prospection methods are used to assess areas. Despite the diversification and increased application of prospection methods within archaeology in recent decades, systematic evaluation trenching is still the most commonly employed technique. Systematic evaluation trenching samples a proposed development area for archaeology, the sample is then used to inform decisions on how best to mitigate the impacts of the proposed developments on the site’s archaeological population. Though this sample is critical for understanding archaeological populations there has been a lack of research into systematic evaluation trenching samples.This thesis begins by identifying the critical position that systematic evaluation trenching holds in developer led archaeology and conducts a survey identifying the normal recommendations of systematic trenching practice in England, finding the industry norm to be varied across counties and normally ranging from 2-5% of a development area sampled by trenches. This thesis then evaluates systematic trenching using GIS simulations of three different systematic trenching arrays over different designs of simplified archaeological sites and archaeological mitigation data, using hundreds of thousands of simulations, at a range of evaluation trenching coverage (1-15%). These simulations provide greater understanding about the false negatives produced by systematic trenching evaluation and demonstrate that there is clear bias in the types of archaeological features that evaluation trenching will detect. Variables including the density of the archaeological remains and the size of the archaeological features directly affect the results of the evaluation sample. Furthermore, the outcomes from the different percentage samples show there is much greater variation at the lower percentages of evaluation trenching (<5% by area). Suggestions are provided to help combat the issue of inaccurate sampling of development areas.
| Date of Award | Aug 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Chris Carey (Supervisor), James Cole (Supervisor) & Matthew Brolly (Supervisor) |