For more than 30 years, geophysical survey has played a major role in developer-funded archaeology in England, especially at the pre-determination stage of planning applications. This project will examine the current use of geophysical survey within archaeological investigation and how collaboration between archaeologists and geophysicists can benefit both disciplines. All work will be undertaken with close consideration of urgent priorities such as the recent White Paper Planning for the Future and the Tailored Review of Historic England 2020.

The research will focus on the nature and suitability of the techniques used in relation to the quality and reliability of survey results when compared to excavation data. The work will also investigate a series of vital questions relating to how the datasets created by numerous separate studies may be combined on a digital platform to allow for landscape-scale coverage, the protocols needed to achieve this, how the results of large-scale surveys are published and made publicly accessible, and how applications could be used to automate the analysis and processing of these large datasets.

Importantly, the project will consider what kind of archaeological structures and deposits are being identified, the extent to which these are representative of archaeological assets as currently understood, and how collaboration across different fields of archaeological endeavour can improve interpretation of the geophysical data and contribute more widely to archaeological resource management...

This collaborative doctoral partnership is hosted by Bournemouth University, co-supervised with Historic England. The studentship is funded by AHRC and Historic England.