27th September 2010, 12:32 PM
drpeterwardle Wrote:PPG 16 archaeology has produced hundreds if not thousands of volumes of excavation reports of a very high quality (compared to what went before) and many areas of study have been revolutionised by the wealth of data produced. But to my mind the problem is that the sampling strategy for data collection is dictated by where land is required for development and this leads to a very skewed data set....Far from being like the wild west with cow boys PPG 16 brought in a massive injection of funding to archaeology say 100 million a year and with it a massive increase in knowledge. I not saying the current system is perfect it isn't from many points of view it is just so much better than the state system that existed before.
I'm currently sorting out the publication for a job I did a few years back where a block of flats was being stuck on top of a (almost entirely invisible/below ground) castle - the whole job was done excruciatingly to the letter of PPG16, the County and EH were all over it, preservation in situ etc. to the extent that the building was re-designed and then we hand-crafted the bits of foundation/service trenchs etc that couldn't avoid archaeology - the result?....yes, there's a castle there and there's some multi-phase stuff underneath, but the end result was a horribly 'bitty' mess where I really can't say much more than that, we saw lots of features we couldn't dig, there are some postholes but anyone's guess what they're part of or what date, there's not enough stratigraphic info to make sense of what is probably a really important pottery assemblage etc etc. The only 'good' thing is that it's all there (apart from all the holes I made in it of course!) in case anyone is still interested in 100 years time when they pull the flats down again....
.......is that really the best way to go looking at a site of national importance?