Between the 5th and 9th of June this year a team from the AML Archaeometry Branch conducted a fluxgate gradiometer survey over the site of the Roman town of Uriconium at Wroxeter in Shropshire. The team consisted of Mark Cole, Sarah Hill, Neil Linford, Paul Linford and Andy Payne and we surveyed a 14 Hectare area adjoining the standing remains which are a scheduled ancient monument in the care of English Heritage. The magnetic response was extremely good allowing wall footings to be delineated as low magnetic gradient anomalies as well as the more usual high magnetic gradient anomalies caused by magnetically enhanced soil.
A low resolution image of our results is depicted below, in this representation highly magnetic anomalies are shown in white and anomalies with low magnetism in black. Whilst it is not easy to distinguish individual features on such a small scale plot, the Roman grid-iron street plan should be apparent and it should also be clear that the entire area is densely packed with anomalies representing the remains of Roman buildings. To analyse the results in detail you can click anywhere on the plot and you will generate a GIF at higher resolution representing an area of 150 by 150 metres, centred on the point you selected. Each such GIF will be about 50Kb in size.
Alternatively you can download a higher resolution plot of the entire survey [271 Kb GIF] representing the above magnetometer data overlaid onto the estate map of the area. Sorry about the large image size but it is impossible to represent the data adequately with any greater compression.
The data we collected has been sent to the Wroxeter Hinterlands Project team, based at the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit where more detailed data analysis and interpretation will take place. Additionally they will use their GIS system to combine our survey with other types of survey data, air photographs, as well as other geophysical surveys conducted by Geophysical Surveys of Bradford and students from Birmingham University. To find out all about the project and how GIS will feature in it see the Wroxeter Hinterlands Project home page.
Finally, you can click here To find out what the Geophysical Survey Database knows about geophysics in the Wroxeter area.
AML Home Page.
![plot of the entire survey [271 Kb GIF]](wrox.gif){kind=link}