Talking to local people can also be useful. Oral history is spoken history. It could be information about a place that local people have always talked about, or it could be an eyewitness account, such as accounts of life during World War 2.

The next step - Survey the ground.

If you are rich enough to have a helicopter, you could look for markings from the air! If you go up when the weather has been dry, you could look for parch Marks. If there is stone under the ground, an old wall, for instance, the grass on top of it will look dry (there isn’t much soil to hold water).

An old ditch will show up as a darker green line (as there is more soil to hold water for the grass). Crops like corn grow taller over ditches; tall areas of crops can cast shadows, showing up shapes of ditches below the soil.

In some places you can make out the walls of whole buildings by this method. In fact you can even do this from the ground, but it is harder to see large shapes.

Shorewalking

Field walking has been done in the Harbour area. A group of people walk across a field, or along the shore, picking up anything that looks old and man-made. They note where in the field the “finds” come from. If there are many finds, that may lead to further investigations!

If you can get hold of special equipment, you might now do a geophysical survey.

Magnetometers measure magnetic traces in the soil, with higher readings where something has been burnt. A trench was dug in August 2007 which confirmed the location of the kiln.

In the harbour seismic refraction has been used at Copperas Point, south of Dell Quay, to find a possible clay pit. This fits with the traces of Roman tile making in the area.

By now you might be getting pretty excited about what lies below the ground at your site. Maybe what you have found is now judged to be too important to dig up! This is good and bad. It means that your research will be recorded, and the site will be saved undamaged for future study, using even better techniques. On the other hand, you may never know what is really there and what it might tell us about the past.

Going Underground!

If you get the go-ahead for further study, you could now dig a small test pit to try to confirm your ideas of what is underground.

Or you might use an auger. In Chichester Harbour augers have been used to twist into the ground and pull out a sample of earth to look at.  The deeper down you go, the further back in time you can investigate. Auger samples taken in Fishbourne Channel showed that there are thin layers of silt and gravel above bedrock, and that the channel would have been too shallow for large Roman boats.

In the Harbour, cores have been taken in 7 places.

A long tube of earth and rock is pulled out of the ground and carefully cut open.

It is looked at in great detail. Fossils, different types of earth and rocks can tell us about the harbour in the past, for example, sea shell fossils mean that the area was underwater. For more detail look at Taking a core


Right: Coring is a way of studying what is underground without digging a big pit.