16th September 2013, 10:51 PM
Unitof1 Wrote:Normally geophysics is used to find minerals and oil and gas. It normally does it by finding what it can do most easily ie your saves time, money back approach
Not sure this makes complete sense!
Unitof1 Wrote:But with polluter pays archaeologists can have a go at finding "all" the archaeology on a site. By all I mean "total archaeology"- single context recording methods of excavation. Archaeologists require "evaluation" to put a cost to this. Geophysics cannot in any way do this. Archaeologists already have a site based on the landowners planning application. All you are doing is selling landowners the promise that they can reduce their archaeological evaluation costs by doing geophysics. You are confusing discovering a potential site with evaluating a site for excavation. Stop it, we already have a "site" of archaeology, we don't need you.
I'm very puzzled as to why you say geophysics can't assist in evaluating a site. Geophysics (and APs and a DBA) all help put the evaluation trenches into a context and so are critical parts of an evaluation. And yes if geophysics is done, and the results assessed properly then I think that you can potentially reduce the amount of evaluation trenching required. Although this actually doesn't see, to happen very often.
I've not read all of your previous posts / rants. Are you saying that all sites that are put up for development should be totally stripped for the purposes of assessing the archaeology and seeing if there is an archaeological site(s) there? I agree that if you do this you don't need geophysics but that isn't going to happen. So because we live in the real world where entire (development) sites are rarely fully assessed then geophysics is needed. Not necessarily by you (I'm presuming you do actually work as a commercial archaeologist?) but by anyone who wants to work in the system of identifying archaeological sites that we have in the commercial sector.