Okay but I don’t think ya’ll appreciate this as much as you should! Figuring out the places of ancient buildings — Roman, Celtic etc — tends to be a bit of a challenge. You have to consider the fact that the land has changed quite a lot over the centuries, with buildings popping up here and there, the topography changing dramatically, rising and falling like no one’s business, forests and cliffs being cut down or collapsing into the sea.
Basically, the descriptions we have of sites in old ass texts can be a nightmare to match up to modern day locations. Some, like Chester and London, are easy. We kept building on them. It’s why there’s an amphitheatre in the middle of Chester and the Roman Wall.
But in other parts of the country its a heck of a lot harder to locate and identify places.
There’s this show called Time Team (or sth like that, it’s been a long long time) and they basically went around the UK digging up ancient sites that they tried to find through radar and aerial imagery etc etc. That requires a fair amount of planning and technology (aka the bane of field budgets everywhere). And even with those and all the nice little people digging away and the photographs and radar imagery, they still had issues figuring out the direction a building went in, which way the wall ran, if this was part of a house or not and so on.
The heatwave and drought about to happen if it doesn’t frickin rain, is useful in that it allows us to see these sites without loads of planning and resources as they are today. We can identify places we’ve not been able to identify, locate sites we’ve wanted to locate for ages, because of the nifty little thing the dirt does when it gets hot and dry and like Satan’s breathing on everything.
And that means that those sites can be logged down, and the modern topography won’t be such a bitch to try and figure out for locations because that heatwave has saved a lot of time and effort!
Basically, don’t be surprised if in the next year or so, there are more reports and research papers about archaeological digsites in the UK from the Bronze Age or the Iron Age because this right here, this damned benighted hellish summer heat, will have been the cause of it all.
Which makes me a little more tolerant of Satan and his dick ass breathing.
