What tools do archaeologists use? Hugo Rail

Everyone thinks that archaeologists just use trowels and toothbrushes and larger tools like pickaxes and shovels when they are exploring a site, but these days there are lot of tools and equipment that we can use to help us explore the past.

We use geophysical survey to find out what lies below the surface and machines to remove the soil before we start digging by hand.

We use GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to help us make quick and accurate plans of our sites and digital scanning to record the fine detail of what we have dug up.

All of these things make excavation and recording much quicker and more accurate but really the tool that we rely on most and without which there would be no archaeology, is the computer in our head – our amazing brain. This is what make sense of all the information that comes out of an excavation and with imagination helps us to tell the story of what was going on in the past.