Sustainability in Archaeology: More Adventures on the Wheels of Steel

Patrick Quinn, Institute of Archaeology Green Champion, has documented travelling to Greece and back without flying, for a research project on ancient stone anchors earlier this year.

A man in a yellow jacket, holding luggage, standing in front of a tall gothic building

After taking the train from London to Bari in Italy, he boarded an overnight ferry across the Adriatic to Patras, before visiting museums in Athens and Volos.

Though these journeys require more planning than a short-haul flight, and unfortunately cost more, they have significantly less environmental impact than air travel. Patrick uses the extra travel time on the comfortable WI-FI-enabled European trains to catch up on emails, read students’ work, and focus on a specific project.

Read about Patrick’s low carbon travels in full here

Patrick previously challenged himself to take a sustainable and low-carbon train journey to the conference in Zagreb, Croatia and back. His trip had 5x less carbon footprint and saved over 400kg of CO₂ compared to flying. He documented his adventure in a blog and an article for Sustainable UCL.

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