Reassessing Surface Artefact Scatters. The Integration of Artefact‐Accurate Fieldwalking with Geophysical Data at Medieval Harbour Sites Near Bruges (Belgium)

Abstract

Archaeological fieldwalking is particularly used to detect sites within a landscape, rather than to assess the internal structure of a site itself. Contributory to this trend is that surface artefact patterns collected by pedestrian field survey are rarely seen as valuable archaeological data for intra-site research. In recent decades, they have been overtaken by other non-invasive prospection methods, which seem to be more efficient and time-effective. This paper aims to reassess fieldwalking as a valuable intra-site prospection method and explores its added value when used in a multidisciplinary framework. The medieval lost harbour site of Monnikerede near Bruges (Belgium) is used as a first test-case. The site was subjected to a grid survey in 1985 and recently acted as the location for an intensive artefact-accurate fieldwalking survey as well as an extensive geophysical survey. Comparing the recent global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-underpinned fieldwalking survey results with a 10 m × 10 m grid survey from 1985, demonstrates the gain in knowledge and detail using the former method. The combination of both fieldwalking and geophysics showed both significant positive and negative relations between surface artefact scatters and subsurface anomalies, hence pointing to the complementary nature and added value of the methods being jointly applied. In addition, the combination of both techniques was tested on a second lost harbour site near Hoeke, to further evaluate the potential of the applied methodology. The results demonstrate that, although the sites have been heavily ploughed for decades, the lateral displacement of artefacts is limited and confined to the original medieval allotment. Finally the integration of surface artefacts with geophysical anomalies enabled to enhance the spatiotemporal interpretation of both sites.

Lost but revived. Revisiting the medieval village of Nieuw‐Roeselare (Flanders) using large‐scale frequency‐domain multi‐receiver EMI and landscape archaeological prospection

“…Despite the much lower number of collected ceramic fragments in comparison to artefact‐accurate field‐walking surveys at the Zwin harbour sites near Bruges ( Trachet, Delefortrie, Van Meirvenne, Hillewaert, & Declercq, ), the relative frequencies of pottery are similar (Table ). Redwares are the most abundant, both in rim‐counts (87%) and RHB (total of rims, handles and bases)‐counts (78%).…”

“…In a final stage, following the geophysical prospection and based on its results, a dedicated smaller scale 8 ha field‐walking campaign was performed following the system of artefact‐accurate field walking as applied by the Historical Archaeology Research Group at Ghent University (Trachet & Delefortrie, Van Meirvenne, Hillewaert, & Declercq, ; De Clercq, Trachet, & de Reu, ). The surveyed field was harvested and ploughed in late autumn and left bare over winter.…”

“…Cross‐disciplinary research on the harbour towns of Bruges demonstrated the potential of such a combined and integrated use of developing geographic information system (GIS)‐capabilities, the availability of new data, such as high‐resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)‐remote sensing and the successful application of geophysical prospection techniques in combination with artefact‐accurate field walking to study lost settlements. The methodology has proven to be particularly useful on medieval sites where the complementary nature of the various methods applied can be fully exploited (De Clercq, Dreesen, Dumolyn, Leloup, & Trachet, ; De Reu, Trachet, Laloo, & De Clercq, ; Trachet, Delefortrie, Van Meirvenne, Hillewaert, & Declercq, ; Trachet, Poulain, Delefortrie, Van Meirvenne, & De Clercq, ). Planted rural settlements have, however, not been included in these studies so far.…”

Nieuw-Roeselare – landscape archaeological and historical geographical research on deserted medieval settlements in the borderlands of Flanders and Zealand

“…The last decade, however, brought a change. Significant multi-disciplinary methodological improvements have been taking place in landscape archaeology, which allow to study buried landscapes of the past through a wide array of non-invasive remote sensing and prospection techniques (Trachet et al 2017a;De Clercq et al 2018: 81-92;De Ruijsscher 2019: 32-43). This renewed methodological impulse offered opportuni-ties to revisit the site of a lost 1 medieval village, Nieuw-Roeselare (New-Roeselare) (Fig.…”

Visibility of Archaeological Record on the Surface

“…Properties of the real distributional pattern and artefact clusters (red dots) are concealed in this aggregate unit density map. recently called for the need of point provenience or artefact accurate survey (see Wessel and Wohlfarth 2008: 15-18, 42-43;García-Sánches 2013;García-Sánches and Cineros 2013: 297-299;García-Sánches and Ezquerro 2014;Trachet et al 2017;de Neef et al 2017: 285, 296;Gruškovnjak 2017b), which allows for recognition of real distributional patterns and spatial associations. However, such high resolution surveys may bring forth the problem of surface coverage because more work hours are needed to accomplish it, and despite the high data resolution and their representativeness within a small area, such an area may be too small to be representative and useful from the regional point of view (e.g.…”