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The effectiveness of dowsing as a method of determining the nature and location of buried features on historic garden sites
Author(s) -
Locock Martin
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
archaeological prospection
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.785
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1099-0763
pISSN - 1075-2196
DOI - 10.1002/1099-0763(199503)2:1<15::aid-arp6140020103>3.0.co;2-1
Subject(s) - archaeology , feature (linguistics) , soil survey , geophysical survey , geology , geography , remote sensing , geophysics , soil science , linguistics , philosophy , soil water
Following the suggestion that dowsing be used as a method of non‐intrusive survey on garden sites, an evaluation exercise, to assess the technique, was devised, using the site of Castle Bromwich Hall. The results showed that dowsing could locate buried metal features, but performed poorly at identifying soil‐filled features. There were also dowsing anomalies that could not be correlated with any buried feature. It is concluded that the technique, as with conventional geophysical survey, needs further investigation before it can be reliably used to provide data directly applicable to the archaeology of historic garden sites.