Martin - useful post, inserts some sense to this thread :face-approve:
Presumably some knowledgeable oversight of the process would considerable improve the results of the project - with lots of local knowledge and professional insight (eg having been around long enough to know how the excavation techniques have changed a lot over the last several decades) I regularly manage to tease important information from old grey lit reports which the excavator and the then curators missed at the time (which is often fair enough - hindsight being a wonderful thing) and hence never made it onto the HER entry. Think what I'm getting at is that a review of the older material should be included in the process?
An example - a town in northern England has an important zone of Medieval waterlogged deposits below part of the market place and adjacent properties. In one small area there were several archaeological interventions in the 1980s/90s which encountered these deposits, although staggeringly none of the resulting grey lit reports include any useable level information! [rather important for informed planning decisions?]. Until I'd had occasion to get all the reports together and go through them (and then do a lot of swearing!), no one had spotted this problem. However, a recent watching brief only a few meters away encountered the edge of the same deposits and got a level on them (it also identified the cause of the waterlogging), information which can now be extrapolated to the earlier work enhancing its value/significance [on the assumption that the artificial perched water table has a fairly consistent level, no reason to think it doesn't]
Presumably some knowledgeable oversight of the process would considerable improve the results of the project - with lots of local knowledge and professional insight (eg having been around long enough to know how the excavation techniques have changed a lot over the last several decades) I regularly manage to tease important information from old grey lit reports which the excavator and the then curators missed at the time (which is often fair enough - hindsight being a wonderful thing) and hence never made it onto the HER entry. Think what I'm getting at is that a review of the older material should be included in the process?
An example - a town in northern England has an important zone of Medieval waterlogged deposits below part of the market place and adjacent properties. In one small area there were several archaeological interventions in the 1980s/90s which encountered these deposits, although staggeringly none of the resulting grey lit reports include any useable level information! [rather important for informed planning decisions?]. Until I'd had occasion to get all the reports together and go through them (and then do a lot of swearing!), no one had spotted this problem. However, a recent watching brief only a few meters away encountered the edge of the same deposits and got a level on them (it also identified the cause of the waterlogging), information which can now be extrapolated to the earlier work enhancing its value/significance [on the assumption that the artificial perched water table has a fairly consistent level, no reason to think it doesn't]