The effectiveness of dowsing as a method of determining the nature and location of buried features on historic garden sites

Following the suggestion that dowsing be used as a method of non-intrusive survey on garden sites, an evaluation exercise, to assess the technique, was devised, using the site of Castle Bromwich Hall. The results showed that dowsing could locate buried metal features, but performed poorly at identifying soil-filled features. There were also dowsing anomalies that could not be correlated with any buried feature. It is concluded that the technique, as with conventional geophysical survey, needs further investigation before it can be reliably used to provide data directly applicable to the archaeology of historic garden sites

Archaeology · Feature (linguistics · Geography · Geophysical survey · Linguistics · Remote sensing · Soil survey · Archaeological Research and Protection · Conservation Techniques and Studies · Geophysical Methods and Applications · Geology · Geophysics · Soil Science