Dedicated Drilling Systems for Archaeological Excavation: Micro-sampling and Stratigraphic Protection

Dedicated Drilling Systems for Archaeological Excavation: Micro-sampling and Stratigraphic Protection

In archaeological exploration, traditional excavation methods can cause irreversible damage to underground artifacts and important historical strata. Therefore, dedicated drilling systems for archaeological excavation have been developed. Their core lies in using micro-drilling techniques—precise, controlled, and precise—to achieve non-destructive or low-destructive exploration of buried information, providing a scientific basis for archaeological decisions and maximizing the preservation of the site's original appearance.

The core of this system is miniaturized and refined drilling sampling. Unlike engineering drilling, it uses micro-drills with extremely small diameters (typically a few centimeters to tens of centimeters) to penetrate different cultural layers with minimal physical openings. The drilling process is extremely slow and gentle, and combined with continuous or segmented coring techniques, it can extract soil, inclusions (such as charcoal fragments and small artifacts), and even fragile cultural layer deposits from different depths to the surface intact in the form of columnar samples, much like a "straw." This provides invaluable microscopic samples for analyzing the chronological sequence of a site, environmental changes, and the extent of human activity, without requiring large-scale excavation.

Stratigraphic protection is the primary principle throughout the entire process. The system is designed to minimize disturbance to the strata. Low-vibration, low-speed drilling methods are employed to avoid damaging the original structure and superposition relationships of the strata. Combined with high-precision positioning and underground imaging technologies (such as miniature ground-penetrating radar), the shape, depth, and material of underground relics can be preliminarily determined without excavation, thus guiding the selection of drilling points and avoiding direct drilling into precious artifacts. All extracted core samples are sequentially numbered, sealed, and recorded, establishing a complete "underground archive."

This approach transforms drilling from a "destructive" exploratory method into a "diagnostic" scientific tool. It enables archaeologists to obtain crucial information at minimal cost before large-scale excavations, allowing them to develop the most scientific excavation plans and more effectively protect irreplaceable cultural heritage. This represents an important direction for the development of modern archaeological exploration towards refinement and technological advancement.