Interesting precedent?

[gumbo]

Yep, sort of agreed Mercenary. I was being a bit simplistic, but I suppose my feeling would be that if a WB was producing as good data as an excavation, then why wasnt it an excavation to start off with. I think we need strong curators for this, who identify the level of mitigation required. I am often surprised about levels of work that do get recommended (both too much and too little).

There are potentially big problems when the findings of a WB become tooimportant. For example, a WB that uncovers a really rich finds assemblage far beyond the what the curator expected (and therefore what has been budgeted for). What is the best way forward? Getting more funds from clients beyond the original brief purely depends on how nice (and rich) they are. In this case, should a new brief be issued by the curator? (I know that this has happened) And at this point surely there is a conflict of interest, because the site archaeologist is making a recommendation to the curator who makes a value judgement that a new brief should be issued which will cost the client more money.

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHH. Its the old quantifying the unquantifiable thing again.

Sorry dont know about Ireland, so wont stick my oar in

g