he Minelab CTX 3030 and its use in archaeological site evalution and identification – by Hrjove Vulic Chief Archaeologist at Vinkovci Museum
Vinkovci municipal Museum is in charge of a 1022 km2 area in the east of Croatia. Due to extremely good geological and geographical positioning this area has always been interesting to people. Due to that fact we have an extremely large density of archaeological sites from the first Neolithic settlers more than 6000 years ago to the post Ottoman era. This fact reflects well in the city of Vinkovci, with 8000 years of continuous archaeological layers and almost a whole city being archaeologically protected.
But, apart from numerous recue excavations, one of our (favourite) activities is field survey. Fresh air, open fields, forests and groves, wildlife and lots of archaeology. This is where the Minelab CTX 3030 has helped us to take things one step further.
We have used metal detectors before whilst conducting field surveys, since unlike stone and pottery, metal objects are difficult to spot using eyes only. The Museum was introduced to Gordon Heritage and Richard Lincoln who demonstrated to us the Minelab CTX 3030 and its integrated GPS, allowing us to find both metal and non metal objects (surface finds, eyes only) and to take their exact position with the data-logging feature. Now of course, one could use both standard handheld GPS in combination with metal detector, but the CTX 3030 is more practical.
With its help (and a bit of luck, of course) we found three new sites and got the exact position of every metal find. This proved to be helpful not only to us, but also to the Conservators office of the Ministry of Culture who decided to include all three sites on the list of legally protected areas based not only on finds, but also because of the maps with positions of the finds within the fields. This is an important step for us, because in Croatia to have a site protected a small excavation to prove the site is demanded by the Ministry of Culture. However, this time due to the quantity of finds with each having its precise position logged the CTX 3030 enabled us to precisely determine the edges of the site. This was enough evidence for The Ministry of Culture to protect the sites that were identified in law.
As Richard has written more about the finds, I’ll just add that all of them are rather important - of course, the Celtic hoard stands out by far. I’m certain that in the future far more sites will be found and protected based only on working on them with CTX 3030, a machine I’d strongly recommend to every archaeologist interested in doing field survey.
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