4th July 2013, 04:46 PM
Surprising how all those old reports sometime add together to make something pretty good - but then I'd forgotten Unit doesn't believe in HERs or writing DBAs, so he'll never experience that pleasure. I've regularly made sense of an apparently 'uninteresting' grey lit report by realising that what they found relates directly to something I've been doing.
As a local e.g. up here, Pete Wilson's monograph on Roman Catterick was essentially a distillation of dozens of small excavations (and one big one) stretching over half a century, but stuck together its now one of the best investigated Roman small towns in Britain - shame he had a 1996 cutoff for inclusion, there's as much again awaiting 'Cataractonium II' and they're about to upgrade the A1 through there. Because of that synthesis of all those overlooked grey lit reports that Unit so loathes, the cumulative assemblage now regularly attracts additional bits of research, adding to its group value, so that a series of small excavations, watching briefs (and NWBs), GI monitoring etc which individually were only of local or sometimes regional value are now regarded as being of at least national and possibly international importance.
Keep sending in those grey lit reports for those of us who do actually use them, published or not :face-approve:
As a local e.g. up here, Pete Wilson's monograph on Roman Catterick was essentially a distillation of dozens of small excavations (and one big one) stretching over half a century, but stuck together its now one of the best investigated Roman small towns in Britain - shame he had a 1996 cutoff for inclusion, there's as much again awaiting 'Cataractonium II' and they're about to upgrade the A1 through there. Because of that synthesis of all those overlooked grey lit reports that Unit so loathes, the cumulative assemblage now regularly attracts additional bits of research, adding to its group value, so that a series of small excavations, watching briefs (and NWBs), GI monitoring etc which individually were only of local or sometimes regional value are now regarded as being of at least national and possibly international importance.
Keep sending in those grey lit reports for those of us who do actually use them, published or not :face-approve: