it; and it only works with remains from the last 10,000 years), the technique brought about a revolution in archaeological understanding. For the first time, it was possible to put reasonably accurate dates on discoveries such as bones. This in some cases led to a complete reassessment of the significance of past finds. Classic cases included the Red Lady of Paviland. It was not until 1989 that the Catholic Church allowed the technique to be used on the Turin Shroud, indicating that the linen fibres were of medieval origin. Other developments, often spin-offs from wartime technology, led to other scientific advances. For field archaeologists, the most significant of these was the use of the geophysical survey. This encompasses a number of remote sensing techniques, such as aerial photography and satellite imagery. Also used is light detection and ranging (LIDAR), a technology that measures the height of the ground surface and other features in large areas of landscape with resolution and accuracy that was not previously available. Subsurface remote sensing techniques such as magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar enable an advanced picture to be built up of what lies beneath the soil before excavation even commences. The entire Roman town of Viroconium, modern day Wroxeter, has been surveyed by these methods, though only a small portion has actually been excavated. The application of physical sciences to archaeology, known as archaeometry or archaeological science, is now a major part of archaeology. Archaeology has also come to use geographic information systems, designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and visualize all types of geospatial data. The discovery in 1991 in the Ötztaler Alps of the prehistorical mummy dubbed Ötzi resulted in the techniques of genetics being brought to bear on archaeological science. With the help of DNA analysis, scholars were able to ascertain that Ötzi does not belong to any known human population. In the subsequent years, genetics has helped us reconstruct human migrations that occurred during prehistory. References Bibliography Attribution: text copied from , see there for edit history. Archaeological sub-disciplines Modernity History of archaeology