9th February 2007, 04:21 PM
Mercenary, I recently worked on material from a 150 trench evaluation project that repeatedly turned up shallow or plough related post-Medieval features, over post-Medieval layers before getting to the earlier archaeology. All the post-Medieval features produced nothing more than highly abraded small fragments of pot and CBM. Now, I would normally be against any form of altering the excavation methodology, but this has persuaded me that perhaps, as there is no meaningful information to be gained, the psot-med strat could be machined off.
This probably won't happed and will take precious time and money to process post-ex, and although within urban areas an effort should be made to standardise methodologies, surely in some large scale excavations some reasonable allowances could be made in consultation with curators. As also recently occurred a curator asked for dry sieving of top soil from eval trenches to produce, yet more pieces of hopelessly small post-med cbm.
Sometimes, especially out of urban areas I think we must re-evaluate where the archaeology can be informative, rather than the strictly academic thought of - all information is valuable.
This probably won't happed and will take precious time and money to process post-ex, and although within urban areas an effort should be made to standardise methodologies, surely in some large scale excavations some reasonable allowances could be made in consultation with curators. As also recently occurred a curator asked for dry sieving of top soil from eval trenches to produce, yet more pieces of hopelessly small post-med cbm.
Sometimes, especially out of urban areas I think we must re-evaluate where the archaeology can be informative, rather than the strictly academic thought of - all information is valuable.