5th January 2013, 01:19 PM
As a personal observation, I (and my colleagues) have done any number of fieldwork projects where the DBA has been totally inadequate and has effectively had been had to be done again by us as the 'archaeological background' part of the WSI. Relying on HER data alone leads to a 'spots on maps' mentality. On a slightly different tack, one example I dealt with a couple of years ago had had a borehole report tacked on as an appendix to the DBA presumably to make it look thicker, but the author clearly hadn't bothered to read (or didn't have the skill to interpret) the thing and had completely failed to notice that the boreholes had identified extremely important and previously unidentified archaeology in their own right, which then had to be highlighted in the WSI. Not sure where I'm going with this, other than to point out that only people who know what they're doing and understand the available data (and where to find it) should be allowed anywhere near DBAs