Is a decent specialist report a luxury?

[redexile]

A any TGM replacement should have been started on 30 years ago

This is the thing with pottery studies (and I'm sure applies to other artefact types as well) - you can get the basics, say the ability to identify 90% of the pottery types you're ever likely to see in a region (inland, anyway), really quickly, it then takes decades to get the other 10%. I've been doing it for 30 years and am still learning, and will continue to do so until the day I fall out of the tree. This, I think, is the basis of 'digger who can do pottery' syndrome. They probably know roughly what they're looking at 80-90% of the time, but they miss the important, unusual stuff, and the subtleties - there's a lot more to pottery than just identifying it. Even something a simple as differentiating between an early or late medieval glaze on the same pottery type is a knack it takes time and experience to acquire. To give an example, someone sent me 6 sherds of med pottery from Reading yesterday, all unglazed, grey/brown and boring. One had a few bits of shell in it, popped it under the microscope, it's London fabric SSW, and the first time it's been found in Reading, altho it's turned up on a few other sites in Berks. Now, I doubt TV crews with be hammering on my door anytime soon, but it's another dot on the distribution map, and a tiny incremental advance in human knowledge. Or they could have given it to a digger and who'd have said '6 sherds of medieval pottery' instead, and saved themselves £10. This is what gets my back up, I think, it's ultimately tiny amounts of money that they're saving.