To most people, soil remediation and archaeology exist in completely different boxes of their minds. They likely think of archaeology as an excavation of the ancient past, with brushes and trowels, to uncover the secrets of what once was. Meanwhile, soil remediation is an excavation of contaminated ground, with excavators and chemical treatments, to help industrial businesses and development. These two disciplines have different scopes, goals and even equipment.
However, spend some time with an experienced environmental consultant, and a comparison begins to make sense.
The similarity between these two disciplines is that they both treat the ground as a record of the past. To the archaeologist, the record is written in soil layers and artefacts, which are used to make physical evidence tell the story of history. To the remediation engineer, the record is written in chemical signatures and patterns of pollutant distribution, which are used to make contamination patterns tell the story of site history. For Soil Remediation, visit soilfix.co.uk/services/soil-remediation
The detective work they conduct is also strikingly similar. For instance, the unexpected direction of a hydrocarbon plume may suggest the direction of underground water movement, which in turn must be understood before any treatment decision is made. Likewise, contamination patterns that don’t make sense may suggest a site history that includes a source that remains unknown. Identifying and elucidating this source requires much the same evidence gathering, hypothesis testing and systematic investigation that the archaeologist would apply to an unexplained find on a site.
