13th October 2005, 05:15 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by Barnesy
Perhaps we should be looking to get a subset of field archaeologists to be trained as mediums then.
That's not such a wacky idea. Frederick Bligh-Bond is supposed to have communicated with dead monks through automatic writing in order to position the trenches at his Glastonbury Abbey excavations.
Personally, I'm all in favour of genetically modified termites. These could be DNA enhanced to only eat one particular kind of deposit (eg post hole fills), then tipped onto the site and left to do their work. At the end of the day all you'd need to do would be to go around and collect all the finds from the nice cleanly excavated post holes. Then collect up the termites and tip some new ones on the site, that only ate pit fills, etc. etc. The archaeologists could then spend all their time filling in the records properly, rather than doing the digging themselves, and the termites could only eat what they'd been created for, so would stop at all the right context edges.
(I suppose if you wanted to take samples you'd need to stand by with a kettle of boiling water or something...)