Souterrains and road schemes

[BAJR Host]

stabbing guess... what to do with a site such as this on a road scheme...
a) flatten?
b) preserve?
c) flatten and record?
d) move each stone lovingly to a new location?

I would guess it is looking for precedent

"I don't have an archaeological imagination.."
Borekickers

[Sparky]

Er...no brainer regarding preservation in situ. Can you imagine. Build over top of it with some sort of reinforcement. A few yeasr later, the road collapses or becomes pot-holed due to increased traffic and heavier vehicles. Roads Authority do what they usually do, i.e. fill in holes and re-surface. Souterain becomes unwittingly filled with hardcore and concrete.
Sorry. Just a hunger fuelled example of what might happen with preservation in situ and saving road builders a bit of cash.
I think precedent is a dangerous tools and often easy examples of caveats to archaeological mitigation (though the opposite is also true). Each case should be treated on its own merit, as is voiced on this site at least once a week.
Back to breakfast.

[BAJR Host]

eat up! I can't wait to hear what happens when you are fuelled!

"I don't have an archaeological imagination.."
Borekickers

[Sparky]

Hopefully a less easy target for snipers.

Re-route or excavate it.

Hosty, If you were still in alive in your past carnation, did you eat breakfast or were you nocturnally fuelled from the blood of developers and non-compliant archaeologists?

[BAJR Host]

I eat from the rotting carcass of corruptions... it is sweeeeeeeeet to me }

"I don't have an archaeological imagination.."
Borekickers

[Sparky]

I'll drink to that!!!!!

[kevin wooldridge]

quote:Originally posted by Sparky

Er...no brainer regarding preservation in situ. Can you imagine. Build over top of it with some sort of reinforcement. A few yeasr later, the road collapses or becomes pot-holed due to increased traffic and heavier vehicles. Roads Authority do what they usually do, i.e. fill in holes and re-surface. Souterain becomes unwittingly filled with hardcore and concrete.'

Regarding preservation in situ, I am not sure it is entirely out of the question. Route 11 in the City of London (now known as London Wall) has an underground carpark for most of the length of the road between Moorgate and the Museum of London in which various sections of Roman city wall are preserved. Likewise there are buried underground railway lines under a lot of London thoroughfares which seem to survive the weight of traffic going over them. Likewise I believe there is a Roman bathhouse under the M1 or A1M at Welwyn Garden City which has been preserved and is still accessible.

....And I once worked on a site in Orkney that had a souterrain over which had been built a broch, and that managed to survive until us archaeologists came and <s>trashed</s> er....preserved it by record in the early 80's.....

[Sparky]

I think the London under-ground is at considerable depth compared to all of the souterrains I've been in.

Fair enough though. I'll let my sugar levels rise before posting.

I like the idea of the bath house at WGC. I googled it and it is indeed under the M1. Briliant! I wonder how much that cost to preserve...

[trowelmonkey]

I think this is a cost/value question. In some areas of the British Isles souterrains are very common and are not even regarded as very exciting unless exceptional by the local archaeologists. In such a region it would not be feasible to do anything but record. Also, many road works require major landscape transformations and I think only a great density of archaeological remains would reroute the road corridor and only then if the cost of excavation/preservation outweighs the additional costs, UNLESS the archaeology was of schedulable importance and even then.....

In some cases I would prefer total excavation of souterrains and other features to other mitigation strategies purely because there hasn't been nearly enough studies on the effects of heavy, fast-moving traffic on underlying deposits because this is such a new problem. Sparky has a point with the backfilled souterrian. Since when was any infrastructure scheme actually joined up? Old archaeological information concerning small features will probably be "lost" when it comes to maintainance work going through tiers of subcontractors. Modern motorways are complex and in many cases deep structures requiring extensive maintainance.

Heading back on topic. To my knowledge souterrains inside road corridors tend to get fully excavated and any bits outside the corridor get left. (Does anyone care to start a thread regarding the wisdom of not being able to extend investigations into areas which although not technichally part of the brief you just know are going to get trashed?) I can think of half a dozen units of the top of my head who have come across souterrains on road schemes in recent years. A quick key word search on google will lead to a lot of brief summaries. Name-dropping a few particular sites to the relevant unit ought to be enough to get the foot in the door, (of course this is easier where there is a publications manager). Some will have been fully published by now, others will only make grey literature. HINT: follow-up Mr Bicket's suggestion and search the SMRs.

Personally, I think it is interesting to see how the ubiquity vs rarity of a feature type determine how much effort is put into understanding it. I suspect that more care is taken excavating souterrains in areas where they are rare and the excavator has not already decided what it is and how it works.

[kevin wooldridge]

quote:Originally posted by Sparky

I think the London under-ground is at considerable depth compared to all of the souterrains I've been in.

I think the MoLAS archaeologist who once went through the roof of the tube with a machine might disagree with that....