Last week, Butser’s experimental archaeologist Ryan Watts visited the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, for a glimpse into new and exciting techniques used in marine archaeology. He met with Dr Sarah Rich and two other experts from the National Maritime Trust to put mesolithic wood samples through an imaging system known as Reflexive Transformation Imaging (RTI).The best way to imagine the process is like looking for an engraving on a wedding ring. The camera takes lots of flash photographs at different angles to pick up tiny marks on the surface, and this is put through bespoke software to make a 3D image. You can then move this 3D image around to check for things like tool marks, incisions and flaws.The wood samples used in this process were from a site called Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged mesolithic settlement site off the Isle of Wight. Over the summer Ryan and Sarah used different mesolithic tools on wood to give a sample set to put through the RTI imaging. When comparing with these modern samples, the prehistoric woodworking samples showed a scale of technology that wasn’t seen for another 2,000 years in Britain. An exciting discovery!One example of this technology is tangentially splitting the wood, which is something we haven’t seen until much later on in human history. If we can identify this for certain, it could possibly be evidence for the building of a logboat – this might be the earliest logboat in the country! Watch this space…