You already practise archaeology. Every time you wonder how something came to be the way it is, you’re doing it.
The patterns on a pavement where pipes were laid and trenches backfilled are the same patterns we read in a field: the track to a junction box, the gap where a phone box once stood. Walls that turn to avoid something thats no longer there. Each interference leaves a trace, and we walk over them every day. I look at the patterns out of habit, I cant not. From them you can reconstruct what happened in this corner of the city — which drill cut which, and in what order, each line crossing the last. You can often track the mistakes and costly interventions that ensued!
In the field the traces are the same; they’re just under the grass. A layer has to come off to reveal them — circles where posts once stood, the long parallel sides of a ditch filled by thousands of years of deposition. We work backwards from the trace to the motion that made it, and from the motion to the people who performed it, and the objects and technology that made their world theirs.
Archaeology is the science of traces — motion traces, and how we read them.
That method doesn’t stop at the edge of a dig. The same operation reads a landscape, a body, an economy, a national story: take the arrangement as it stands now and work back to the movement that produced it, and to whose movement it was. That’s what this site is — that one operation, run across archaeology, history, and the philosophy underneath both. Some of it is conventional fieldwork-grounded research. Some of it is more speculative. It hangs together because it’s all the same way of seeing.
I’m Dylan Foley, based in the north-west of Ireland. 20 years in the field — I have worked on many sites from ancient mills to graveyards, and from industrial turbines to Bronze Age houses. Degree in archaeology and IT, and an MSc in AI and Data Science from Galway University and Atlantic Technological University. I code mostly in Python. Current technical work — Foley & Furey, ISSC 2025,published in IEEE. I also like comics and robots.