An assessment of the significance and social impact of the quarrying industry in Shropshire in the 19th and 20th centuries Robert. S. Galloway This thesis investigates the technological innovations associated with the quarrying industry of Shropshire during the 19th and 20th centuries, from the extraction of rough-cut limestone, to greywacke used as road stone, sandstone flags found in vernacular buildings and finally to dimension stone. Examples of the minerals can be found in Shropshire, so such a breath of geology has made this county unique. Knowledge of geology and minerals is united in the quarrying industry. The inaccessibility and remote location of the raw materials has made the quarrying industry different from and other. The many methods of transport are also traced up to the 20th century. Access from remote locations to villages, towns and cities was very difficult. Britain's 18th century roads were made in form of causeways, constructed of stone and rubble, so narrow that only one horse-drawn cart could pass at a time. Eventually a network of roads spread across the country, enabling local and national economics to flourish. The quarrying industry, associated firstly with agriculture, rose to the ever-increasing needs of the industrial revolution by moving from manpower to machinery driven by stream.

With over 200 pools, lakes and rivers supporting over 70 species of endemic flora and fauna, the Cuatro Cienegas Basin, Coahuila, NE Mexico is an extremely important and extensively studied area in terms of conservation. The palaeoenvironment, however, is relatively understudied with only two reconstructions published to date - Meyer [1973] and Minckley and Jackson [2008]. This project has analysed a 15 m carbonate sediment core for multi-proxy palaeoenvironmental information and combined this with stable isotope, modern hydrological and geoarchaeological information in the Cuatro Cienegas Basin.

Electromagnetic (EM) techniques are used to locate and map archaeological features through differences in soil EM properties (linked to geotechnical properties and climatic conditions), but these have poorly understood seasonality to their response, and poor performance on certain (especially fine grained) soils. Customised Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) monitoring stations were used to collect hourly apparent relative dielectric permittivity (ARDP), bulk electrical conductivity (BEC) and temperature data from archaeological features and the surrounding soil matrix (SSM) for four sites over a 16-23 month period. Soil samples were taken to study links between geotechnical and EM properties in the laboratory. Differences in BEC-VWC (volumetric water content) and ARDP-VWC relationships between fine and coarse grained soils were found, but differences between archaeological and SSM soils were small, confirming field measured contrasts predominantly result from VWC differences. ARDP-VWC relationships were affected by the EM loss tangent rather than just bound water as previously suggested, making BEC and magnetic properties of the soil significant. Both archaeological and SSM soils showed similar trends in recorded values and infiltration responses after rainfall events, and differences were predominantly due to water holding capacities of the soils and variations in drying patterns which were tied to the properties of the soil, especially porosity, clay content and mineralogy. Whilst coarse grained soils showed good EM contrasts throughout, smaller contrasts were found on fine grained soils, with optimum times for detection found during dry conditions when VWC differences were at a maximum and during warm periods where BEC differences were accentuated.