25th May 2005, 10:23 PM
I actually specify in the letter of instruction that the spec and assessment should be read by the person in charge on site. I should not have too but I have found it neccessary.
I also try and talk to the diggers when I am doing a monitoring visit. Some organisations like to keep me in the dark and on one site I was ordered off the site by the supervisor because my presence was stressing him.
On another site I asked for more of a feature to be excavated and was told bluntly that the spec did not allow him to do it.
There is a difference between what is intended and what happens on site.
It is naive to pretend otherwise but the people compiling these documents should in fact be aware of this.
In reality about 1 page of a spec is project specific and the rest is auto generated - so what is the point of reading it all.
On one project I recently did we generated about 600 pages of infomation before the field work. It takes a good day or so to read it all. I think in total about 12 different people worked on the site and the costs of them reading all the material would have about 2k - a measurable proportion of the cost.
Where do you stop if you are digging in town x should everybody be given time to do background reading? Imagine this for a place like Caerleon. Then of course everybody must read PPG 16, The 1979 Act and all the other documents at least once a quarter.
I nearly forgot - there are all the other planning documents like the ecology and tree report - so everybody understands why it is important not to damage the routes of trees.
Then there are the regional research aggendas and the local plan policies.
Thus we could have a 1 day evaluation which finds nothing and the cost would be:
writing spec 170
on site 150
background research 2000
writing a report saying there is nothing there 800
archiving
What is required is a 1-2 page overview of what the project is about archaeologically and from a development point of view. A page of variations to a standard spec. This can be culled from the various documents produced anyway and given to staff to read in the van on the way to site.
A balance is needed.
Peter
I also try and talk to the diggers when I am doing a monitoring visit. Some organisations like to keep me in the dark and on one site I was ordered off the site by the supervisor because my presence was stressing him.
On another site I asked for more of a feature to be excavated and was told bluntly that the spec did not allow him to do it.
There is a difference between what is intended and what happens on site.
It is naive to pretend otherwise but the people compiling these documents should in fact be aware of this.
In reality about 1 page of a spec is project specific and the rest is auto generated - so what is the point of reading it all.
On one project I recently did we generated about 600 pages of infomation before the field work. It takes a good day or so to read it all. I think in total about 12 different people worked on the site and the costs of them reading all the material would have about 2k - a measurable proportion of the cost.
Where do you stop if you are digging in town x should everybody be given time to do background reading? Imagine this for a place like Caerleon. Then of course everybody must read PPG 16, The 1979 Act and all the other documents at least once a quarter.
I nearly forgot - there are all the other planning documents like the ecology and tree report - so everybody understands why it is important not to damage the routes of trees.
Then there are the regional research aggendas and the local plan policies.
Thus we could have a 1 day evaluation which finds nothing and the cost would be:
writing spec 170
on site 150
background research 2000
writing a report saying there is nothing there 800
archiving
What is required is a 1-2 page overview of what the project is about archaeologically and from a development point of view. A page of variations to a standard spec. This can be culled from the various documents produced anyway and given to staff to read in the van on the way to site.
A balance is needed.
Peter