Fieldwalking
The purpose of field-walking is to locate potential archaeological sites and indicate a possible date by recovering artefacts on the ground surface.
It is probably the simplest form of fieldwork and the one that needs least equipment. Archaeologists will set up a grid and walk over a ploughed field to find artefacts that have been brought to the surface by ploughing. The types of things that are frequently found include pottery, tile, brick, flint artefacts and animal bone. The finds are then plotted on a map and can show where there are concentrations of particular types of finds. This may suggest that there are buried archaeological sites underneath.
Going the extra mile
It is important that your field-walkers are familiar with what kind of things you want to pick up so if working with inexperienced field-walkers it may be advisable to have an artefact handling session beforehand - if you are not familiar with archaeological artefacts then the County Museum’s Portable Antiquities Officer may be able to assist. It is best to walk on a ploughed field where artefacts have been thrown up to the surface. It has also been found useful to field-walk a field after a few weeks of weathering has exposed more artefacts.
You will need garden canes and at least two long tapes, an optical square or a dumpy level, theodolite or EDM with appropriate measuring staff for setting out the grid. It is important that the grid can be tied into the Ordnance Survey mapping. To do this you must tie your grid into prominent points in the landscape that are recorded on your map and, wherever possible, to a benchmark so that you can also work out the height of your site above sea level. For field-walking you will also need finds bags for each grid square, which must be sealable and have a white band for writing on
Once the grid is set up you can start walking. Each walker should be given some finds bags and should use one for each square. The walkers should be spread out, one starting at each cane along the base-line. They walk from one cane to the next, picking up what they see on the ground to 1m either side of them and put it in a finds bag. On reaching the next cane, the field-walker leaves the finds bag/s next to it, whether it is full or not. This continues all along the walk until the last cane is reached. The bags can then be collected and labelled with the square they represent.
Once you have the artefacts identified and dated (see artefact recording), you can plot the distribution and frequency on your grid. You may create several frequency maps if you have a lot of artefacts of different type and date, or you can try to give different artefacts different symbols, as long as the distribution doesn’t overlap. See this diagram below:
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You can see that this gives you some idea of the centre of the distribution and the area of highest frequency of certain artefacts. This will help target later forms of evaluation technique and excavation. Click here to move on to topographical survey.
Further reading
Leach, P 1994 (2nd Edn) The Surveying of Archaeological Sites. Archetype Publications.
Click here to go on to the next step: geophysical survey.
Click to find out other ways to get involved in archaeology.