22nd July 2013, 04:03 PM
Sorry Unit, but I stand by my assertion that we should always try to do the best we can, rather than the least we can get away with. Sure, there are (hopefully rare) occasions where emergency action is required during a machine-watching exercise, and in thos cases we do the best we can with limited time and tools. (Who hasn't carried a cheeky soil sample home in a bucket, for want of bags/tags etc at the moment the bulldozer exposed a feature? But we only do so if we know there ain't no way we can stop the machine long enough to do it properly...) Besides, how archivally stable are your envelopes? Do you make 'em out of permatrace? And if you don't bother to measure in the location of that solitary post hole in your tiny eval trench, how can anyone else identify it later when a bigger firm gets the contract to strip the whole area and finds it covered with similar postholes making pretty buildings? I'd rather see the whole archaeological profession scrapped than see it ruined by "done shoddy and cheap" practices that milk off the cash from little old ladies while producing rubbish. Of course, I'm sure you meant that you only cut such corners in extremis...
As for Kevin, I've worked with him and understood his statement to mean he does the mental effort of "interpreting", then chooses the right codes etc on his TST to get it to do the donkey work of creating a plan and the related context records via some clever software. However, it is still up to him (the human in the equation) to discover and understand the archaeology first!
As for Kevin, I've worked with him and understood his statement to mean he does the mental effort of "interpreting", then chooses the right codes etc on his TST to get it to do the donkey work of creating a plan and the related context records via some clever software. However, it is still up to him (the human in the equation) to discover and understand the archaeology first!