17th August 2013, 04:50 PM
My personal experience of large excavations, particularly urban ones, with detailed sampling strategies in place at the outset is that they invariably turn out to be b***ocks and get abandoned after the first week, around the same point that the realisation sinks in that the archaeology's nothing like what was expected. On rare occasions where I've been working for people who've gone the 'random' route [e.g. every third feature or the like] it's usually led to all the best stuff getting missed and all the pointless stuff like postholes (which on many sites massively outnumber potentially environmentally interesting features like cesspits, and hence get to be the main thing sampled) getting done.
There's got to be a really good reason to waste thousands of pounds doing analysis on undated deposits (particularly at the expense of dateable ones), and if there's macro enviro material in it, why isn't it being dated anyway? Drives me up the wall, all the pollen/macros reports that go into vast detail about the sequence when they haven't bothered pinning dates on it, or, even more annoyingly, only one. Things like the Elm Decline demonstrably happen at widely different times in different places, so I'm amazed people still get away with using stuff like that as their dating tool
There's got to be a really good reason to waste thousands of pounds doing analysis on undated deposits (particularly at the expense of dateable ones), and if there's macro enviro material in it, why isn't it being dated anyway? Drives me up the wall, all the pollen/macros reports that go into vast detail about the sequence when they haven't bothered pinning dates on it, or, even more annoyingly, only one. Things like the Elm Decline demonstrably happen at widely different times in different places, so I'm amazed people still get away with using stuff like that as their dating tool