4th August 2011, 08:14 PM
Jack Wrote:Rotting in situ.............but takes ages.
Or a combination.........collapse of structure then rots in situ, i.e. post moves but stays mostly in the posthole.
Burning a few down and then letting the below-ground stumps rot in situ would be favourite, particularly if you could mark some of the wood pre-fire (?drawing pins?) to see what charcoal from which parts of the post wound up in the post-pipe/subsidence cone - would have a significant bearing on the validity of C14 samples from a lot of prehistoric sites - I've got a lot of charcoal from a lot of big (up to 0.8m) neolithic posts but will probably end up with no idea what potential samples will have any bearing on the felling-dates for the trees, would be nice to know which bits wind-up preserved within the features....