Road radar to reveal Roman remains in York

A vehicle equipped with specialist radar equipment is set to survey 20km of streets around York over the summer – the first time a project on this scale has been undertaken in the UK. The team behind the scheme are working to access as much of the city centre road network as possible, including some pedestrianised streets, during the survey. Alongside the road surveys, a radar system will scan the green spaces in the city centre, particularly around the Yorkshire Museum and York Minster.

The initiative is a joint project between Universities of Cambridge and Reading , York Archaeology and the York Museums Trust funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The 30 month long project aims to collate everything archaeologists and historians know about the whole of Roman York into a single database which will then be made freely available to the public.

The radar mapping exercise will start in the summer, with dry weather being crucial to the success of the scanning.

The wider research will bring together the results of excavations over the last 50 years and also other, less formal, sources of information, including historic press reports of Roman finds, notebooks and published reports from the 18th century onwards. Updates on the project will be posted on yorkarchaeology.co.uk/ romanyork.

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