Departmental Facilities
Given the Department of Archaeology's reputation for archaeological fieldwork (both survey and excavation), it is very well equipped to undertake most types of field projects. However, laboratory, computing and teaching facilities are also of a high standard.
The Department of Archaeology is based in the Medecroft campus of the University together with the History department.
Medecroft was originally a Victorian villa later used as a military hospital, but which has now been converted for use a classrooms, laboratories and offices. Our facilities in Medecroft include a photographic dark room, a computer laboratory, an analytical laboratory, a teaching laboratory, and a materials work room, as well as storage space for our equipment and the finds/samples that result from field projects. In addition to facilities in Medecroft, we also make use of computer laboratories, and larger teaching rooms on the King Alfred Campus.
We have excellent field equipment including two Geoscan resistivity metres, two Geoscan magnetometers and a Bartington magnetic susceptibility metre. Our fieldwork equipment comprises two Leica total stations, two Leica differential GPS, several recreational GPS, manual and powered augers, and enough excavation gear to equip a team of 70. Our facilities for processing field data are also good and include GIS (ArcGIS), geological (RockWorks), geophysical (InSite and GeoPlot), excavation management (Stratify) and radiocarbon calibration (OxCal and Calib) software on our network. In addition we possess ceramic, vertebrate bone and molluscan reference collections for the post-fieldwork study of these classes of remain.