Doug Wrote:yes- digging should be the final solution and always done.

Doug Wrote:........Anyways it is why I, and most PMers, don't recommend PM to replace anything. It is best used by consultants in the early planning stages of a project e.g. build your road here if you want to avoid it.

Quote:can even reveal aspects of past land use that you will never find in an evaluation trench

Doug Wrote:Not insulting in the least bit. PM even after 40 years still has much to be improved upon. Though I have not personally worked on it for 40 years.

Yes- what is important differs from place to place- in southwest US it is 10 lithics within 100m or 3 anything that is datable and all over 50 years of age (not still in use). Here it is what the council arc or EH/HS/Cadw/ etc. says is important with some guidelines.

If you are interested in more I would recommend this publication- https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/11863 stroll to the bottom to get the full pdf


Chapter one will give you a good overview and the other chapters cover a lot of your questions.

I would recommend reading the beginning of chapter 7. It illustrates my point made ages ago in this thread- even with predictive modelling being very good you always, always test. The other chapters are fairly good at explaining the different ways PM works in detail.


For interesting work on heritage management and PM-
http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/issue8/ebertandsinger.html


For the most recent work on the subject this is a good read

http://www.academia.edu/433078/P._Verhagen_and_T.G._Whitley_2012_._Integrating_Archaeological_Theory_and_Predictive_Modeling_a_Live_Report_from_the_Scene._Journal_of_Archaeological_Method_and_Theory

Overall predictive modelling is basically a deskbased assessment. The only difference is that instead of going to the HR and seeing if anything has been found before in an area and then making a judgement call you follow a set methodology. Not saying what people do with deskdased assessment is flawed just that with PM there are ways to account for problems with the HR that people may not employ on their own deskbased assessment.

Can't iterate this enough- PM can be very very good but it is never 100%. As the Dutch have learned (see that chapter 7) it can not replace actual investigations. It can however sever as a good consulting tool for those in the business of consulting clients about what sort of archaeology to expect. Well, what sort of archaeology they will be required to deal with. As Kevin and Jack point out archaeology is everywhere but not everyone agrees on what it is or what is important.

Jack- some of those resources are some pretty heavy jargon laced reading that I even have trouble getting through at times. Also, it doesn't capture all of the possible ways of doing things. Your question about testing models actually has about 4-5 different ways of doing it. Actually- two main ways but lots of sub-catagories. One is you go out and test your models (can be expensive) e.g. I say you will find site type X here but not there so lets excavate here AND there using a sampling strategy that can then be applied to eerything (people often make the mistake of only looking where they predict things to be- you can see the flaw in that. Very relevant to the geophys talk as well.) or two you look at past data- which involves all sorts of extra steps to eliminate response bias (which are not perfect). If you want I can point you in the direction of good examples. I am afraid that in only a couple of hundred words I am leaving out all the nuances and problems people have found with PM (and that PP finds entertaining) so it is probably not the best explanation of how PM works.

Hope those readings help. If you have anymore questions please fire away.

Unitof1 Wrote:when the client wants you to find nothing so that the other half of your time you look for nothing which is why you will use negative results from pm as an excuse not to evaluate by trench most of the area and you and the so called curators can pretend that geophysics has done the archaeology.

Jack Wrote:On large projects, especially in the pre-planning stage, good archaeological companies/consultants produce DBA's and/or contribute to the project environment statement (ES) including HER/NMR searches, aerial photography searches (or google earth - hooray), Lidar inspection, site walkover, fieldwalking, geophysical survey and trial-trenching to test the previous info. From these and varying forms of predictive modelling, recommendations are made, which are often followed and/or adapted. These recommendations can include site avoidance, the best form of mitigation.

Unitof1 Wrote:like what, tree throws, ard marks, forestry, ploughing, metal working, mining? It cant "find" anything. It just produces the "possible" archaeology of resistivity, magnetometry refraction, reflection....diggers are the only archaeology producing machine.

Jack Wrote:I have been involved in several projects where the client avoided important archaeology either by route change, construction methodology change or even abandoning building in that area entirely. Surely this is the best result, so that the remains can be excavated at a later stage under a research dig rather than rescue dig?