EXA: What's it all about?

Extreme Archaeology's lead archaeologist, Katie Hirst, explains what lies behind the idea of this kind of 'archaeology on the edge'.

Easy life

Human beings like an easy life. We tend to stick to the rich, fertile areas of the world that are easily accessible and will produce enough food to live off. This means that the vast majority of archaeological remains, houses, cemeteries and so on are found in relatively hospitable places that don't need much more than a decent trowel to excavate.

There are exceptions. Some remains of human activity are located in the most remote and inhospitable parts of the world. This is for a variety of reasons: defensive strategies, religious beliefs, the search for particular resources or raw materials, shipwrecks and other accidents, to name but a few. Sometimes, too, remains that were once in more accessible places are now underwater, on cliff faces or edges or otherwise difficult and dangerous sites as a result of erosion or climate and other changes.

Islands and caves

Religious beliefs often dictate that solitude and simplicity must be sought. The UK is peppered with remote islands, some of which even today are inhabited by monks. There are Buddhist meditation caves high in the Himalayas and hermit cells in Ethiopia only accessible by ropes. Many of these places have been used for hundreds and even thousands of years and provide valuable information about earlier religious practices.

Shallow caves and rock hollows have provided shelter for human beings for millennia. But go deeper into some of these systems and your head torch might flash across ancient paintings and carvings on the walls – like those found at Altamira in northern Spain and the Dordogne area in France. These deeper locations probably provided the setting for initiation rituals and possibly teaching aids for hunting. Other caves contain bones and pottery that have fallen or been washed into holes on the surface and accumulated below ground. Although these artefacts are not found in situ, they can still provide a valuable snapshot of a life that was lived above.

Extreme lengths

Some archaeological remains located in remote locations are there as a result of beliefs that mean extreme lengths are taken to honour the dead. The Bo people of south-east China, for example, mounted coffins on wooden stakes 150 metres up sheer cliff faces. The higher they were placed, the more prestigious was the person. And 1500 years ago, in the Timbac region of the Philippines, boiling water was poured down cliff faces to create holes in the rock where mummified bodies were stacked. All of these sites are now threatened by erosion.

Many of these sorts of archaeological remains are first discovered by accident by climbers, cavers and divers, who report their finds to archaeologists who often don't have the resources to do any further investigation. Thousands of sites worldwide are eroding fast, or are in danger of development, quarrying or robbing by locals who see the archaeology as a valuable source of income. Before they disappear forever they need to be reached, investigated and recorded – which is where the concept of 'extreme archaeology' comes in.

Small team, little time

Between the members of the Extreme Archaeology team, just about every physical and archaeological challenge can be tackled. By necessity, there is only a small team involved – too many people hanging off ropes at any one time would be a safety nightmare. This means that everyone has to share in all the tasks, and be prepared to go to extremes to get there.

Time is also limited due to the difficult physical conditions and filming schedules. The archaeologists have to extract as much information as possible from the site as quickly as possible. This has meant experimenting with many different types of recording techniques to help things along. For example, all of our written and drawn archaeological records are digitised on site by inputting information straight into a computer, rather than using the traditional paper records that are difficult to handle in the environments we are working in.

New technology

As part of this, Cyrax laser surveying is an invaluable new technology that is revolutionising how archaeology can be recorded. We can scan and model a site in 3D in minutes rather than using hours of painstaking traditional surveying methods. The laser survey and digital records are fed into a GIS programme with other details like aerial photographs, geophysics results, topographic maps and so on, which means we can build up layers of information about the site that can be targeted at the push of a button.

The artefacts that we manage to reach are used to date the site and give an idea of what it was used for. Anything that we find is minutely analysed to extract as much information as possible. The aim is to contribute a lot to our archaeological knowledge by reaching these sites that would otherwise be destroyed over time and recording what we can by the least invasive means.

It's truly archaeology on the edge, both physically in terms of the locations and how we get to them, and technologically in terms of the equipment and techniques that we are making use of.