8th June 2013, 08:19 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:These lessons are all well and good, but I think the School has skirted around the essential core question. How educated do you have to be to be an archaeologist? I don't mean necessarily in terms of formal academic qualification, but in terms of all round 'worldly knowledge'....for a profession that essentially deals with cultural interpretation, it seems to me that you must actually have read one or more books all the way through, and to kind of have an understanding of where, what and why humans do certain things in certain ways....
A lot more general worldliness, common sense, understanding of basic rules of the universe and enquiring minds would be nice judging by some of the stuff I've read on context sheets over the years - I am right in thinking that water flows downhill for instance, aren't I? And some of the stuff that gets written in the 'formation process' box on our context sheets should get its own website, clearly the average digger has never actually bothered to watch what happens on e.g. a modern farm which fundamentally isn't much different to what happened on a Roman farm (although apparently those pesky Romans spent much of their time going around backfilling all their field boundaries on a regular basis - were they in the wrong place or something?), i.e. we don't actually bury people/animals in active ditches [bloated corpses floating down them come the spring] although we might bury people/animals alongside a hedge long after the adjacent ditch had silted up and grassed over - sadly this naivety and lack of general common sense seems to extend to many report authors/prehistorians too
...no wonder a lot of the 'public' have the perception of archaeologists as a bit odd... @Wax - Droit de seigneur when I was a kid
