28th December 2012, 11:23 AM
Kel Wrote:But if those are fragments of chicken bone from an Iron Age site, they could be archaeologically and culturally the most important things there. Can you trust diggers to identify them and bring them to your attention? And if they did, would you believe them enough to have them verified by a specialist? Or would they just be labelled "Bird bone" and archived?
firstly you would have had to have already established that the context in which they were found was indeed iron age, that it had not been contaminated, that the finds were not intrusive or residual etc etc. i am not advocating that diggers decide on their own discard policy i am merely pointing out that when the project manager undertakes a post-excavation assessment it is perfectly ok to make decisions pertaining to further reporting based on the evidence at hand without regard to a specialist. first and foremost we have to establish the value of the context and its stratigraphic position in the deposit sequence.
one of the main problems with the old archarchaeology was that resourses were often squandered on futile and meaningless analysis. on large projects this should be a team decision but on smaller projects very often that is not necessary
@redexile - surely the ifa has a well developeded and respected finds goup with a commitee of specialists of considerable repute who advise council. are you suggesting that they are somehow incompetent or are you suggesting that they are not heard by council?
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers