28th December 2012, 11:57 AM
P Prentice Wrote: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
This is one of the problems that Chris and myself have highlighted in past papers - most managers are fields archys, and make their decisions entirely from that point of view. Important/useful artefacts are not always well- or 'usefully' stratified, and archaeology is not just about interpreting layers of dirt. At the risk of reductio ad absurdum, the Staffordshire Hoard was mainly unstratified but more seriously, the example I gave earlier about the small assemblage of pottery from Reading I looked at the other day is a better example.
P Prentice Wrote:surely the ifa has a well developed and respected finds group with a committee 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?
Indeed it does, and some of them are friends of mine, and are excellent archaeologists. From what I can glean, the council don't/won't listen. Again, we've written a paper or two about this - there is (and probably always has been) a view that finds people are not 'proper archaeologists' (Unitof1's hilariously ignorant rant above sums it up beautifully) and finds are basically a way of providing dates for the strat, and are otherwise boring and useless, especially pottery. Suggest you have a read of some of the stuff we did in the 90s, it covers these arguments extensively.
\"Whoever understands the pottery, understands the site\" - Wheeler