SEMINAR: ARCHAEOLOGY SEMINAR SERIES

Archaeology and the natural sciences have had a cordial relationship at least since the days of Boucher de Perthes. On the whole the traffic in data has been lopsided, with archaeology hungry for new weaponry in its analytical armoury and many scientists sniffy about what is on offer from a discipline they see as thinly disguised antiquarianism. Of course geologists go on using artefacts to good effect to date sediments and landscapes, and hominin remains and prehistoric art as elements in environmental reconstructions, but sites with a secure chronology increasingly offer a wide range of data which are underpinned by archaeology but can serve disparate ends. The Levantine caves of Mount Carmel provide a good example of this reversed flow of benefits, as the application of novel dating techniques to Dorothy Garrod's 1937 stratigraphy (including its rolled artefacts) has now documented uplift of the mountain by some 40m over the last 120,000 years and thus illuminated an active offshoot of the Dead Sea Rift better than any geoscientist has hitherto managed. Some excavators may resent their sites being hijacked in this fashion: yet we can fruitfully use stratified sites to quantify DNA degradation, microclimate or changes in the Earth's magnetic field as well as to investigate cultural or palaeoeconomic development.