The development of geophysical survey remains a spearhead-priority for new research and cultural resource management alike – since geophysics can find and map sites without destroying them. However, there are current weaknesses of sensitivity and resolution – the instruments cannot easily “see” small features like graves and post-holes of which so many ancient sites are principally composed. Great hopes have been invested in caesium vapour magnetometers, which the Centre for Archaeology has been promoting in England – perhaps nowhere with such dramatic success as at Stanton Drew, Somerset. Here, geophysical techniques have brought to light the lines of broad circles belonging to a previously unrecognised henge monument, and the caesium magnetometer showed these circles to be composed of individual pits about 1.4 m in diameter. The fine focus achieved for these buried features augers well for the discovery and preservation of similar sites and monuments in the future.

The hot and dry summer of 1995 once again proved the value and cost-effectiveness of aerial survey. Numerous parchmarks were a product of the dry conditions throughout England, but especially in chalk grassland, and they revealed important new archaeological information. A parchmark within the great Neolithic henge at Avebury identifies a new subterranean feature, confirmed by geophysical survey, which fills in further details of the Avebury enclosure.

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