With all the new technology do you think that some day there will be no need for archaeologists to do hands on digging? I hope not! Aimee Baumanis (9)

I don’t know as I have seen so many changes to technology like geophysical survey in the (very) long time I have worked in archaeology that nothing would surprise me. But I don’t really think that there will ever be a time when archaeologists don’t have to dig as even if we can ‘see’ into sites there will still be the need to recover artefacts and samples for dating and other sorts of analysis. I do wonder if in the future we will be able to carbon date samples on site. That would be amazing!

Answered by:

Julian Richards

Julian Richards is best known as the TV archaeologist from Meet the Ancestors and Blood of the Vikings. He loves Stonehenge – and has even written a pop-up book about it!

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