27th May 2005, 03:25 PM
I've always found it interesting how standards are maintained in the profession, and it's not from the top down as might be expected.
Every Unit I've worked for has had good field practice initiated by the excavators. Not by the Unit Directors, not by the Curators, and certainly not by the consultants. Whether we were allowed to maintain good field practice by said parties was largely dependant on how stubbornly we stuck to our, some would say naive, beliefs.
I certainly did not get into this business to do archaeology badly, but somewhere along the line I've been worn down. I now find myself occasionally called up on iffy techniques by excavators that I'm supervising.
To return this to the original subject, I think this degradation of good practice also applies to the rightly revered single context planning system, hence the multitude of hybrids. Maybe how purely the system is applied is dependant on how many newly trained archaeologists there are on the site!
Every Unit I've worked for has had good field practice initiated by the excavators. Not by the Unit Directors, not by the Curators, and certainly not by the consultants. Whether we were allowed to maintain good field practice by said parties was largely dependant on how stubbornly we stuck to our, some would say naive, beliefs.
I certainly did not get into this business to do archaeology badly, but somewhere along the line I've been worn down. I now find myself occasionally called up on iffy techniques by excavators that I'm supervising.
To return this to the original subject, I think this degradation of good practice also applies to the rightly revered single context planning system, hence the multitude of hybrids. Maybe how purely the system is applied is dependant on how many newly trained archaeologists there are on the site!