Time Detectives

Advances in technology have moved archaeology into a new age. Yesterday's solitary romantic adventurers are today's team of sophisticated, multi-disciplinary scientists capable of studying ancient diets from bone collagen and reconstructing millenia-old landscapes from fossilized seeds and grains. Excavations today move less earth in two years than those of a couple of generations ago moved in a month - and they learn vastly more about how our ancestors lived. Archaeologists head teams of experts who know how to use infra-red photography to decipher Roman documents etched on wood, and entomologists whose knowledge of beetles makes it impossible to deduce the uses of a wooden site in Bronze Age England.