Steven Wrote:
"can produce a case study (if you wish) where the sub contexts of a data set has been missed meaning that the data has been interpreted in a profoundly different way from and an alternative manner... moreover the meaning and context of the data is frozen by research agendas imposed by said middle management."
Mainly I'm worried because I don't believe it makes any sense whatsoever, what do you mean "a profoundly different way from and an alternative manner"? That's just weird, sorry but it is!
OK lets address this weirdness
What evidence is there, if any, for the decline in activity on the site in the mid-2nd century?
where does this research question come from? lets choose one major source
Marsden’s and West’s Population change in Roman London
The basis of their ideas is that there is dearth of late Roman pottery in the assemblage and this must represent a decline in population and economic activity. The Decline in Roman London is portrayed as quite dramatic occurring sometime in the mid 2nd cent with some sort of minor recovery to levels that never match Londinium at its hey day which is assumed to be around 120AD. Their argument was presented graphically thus
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On the left is the distribution of Roman pottery found disposed of in Rubbish pits which show a marked decrease after 150AD. At the time counter arguments were made that the late Roman assemblage was truncated out of the record by medieval and later activity.
Marsden and West’s insightful rebuttal was to analyse residual roman pottery in medieval rubbish pits which truncated the Roman levels. Their argument goes that if late Roman activity is truncated away by subsequent eras then the distribution pattern of Roman residual pottery in medieval pits should show a marked different profile than the Roman Rubbish pit profile after all this missing late Roman pottery has to go somewhere and the closest in time features should display this late assemblage. Well the medieval profile on the right doesn’t show a marked change and the argument that the pottery assemblage the Romans left is displayed by later residual assemblages is pretty compelling evidence that Roman activity declined post 150AD.
now what is the
context of that pottery data? ... well there are two, Residual roman pottery in medieval pits and Roman pottery in Roman pits
The use of pits is a broad context with unstated assumptions. is the pottery in the later Roman pits actual thrown away or is that by some other mechanism for instance.? there is no attempt to sub divide the assemblage into parts from different types of contexts. Among the unstated assumptions is that the dominant mechanism does not change in time also there is an assumption that the roman assemblage can only be truncated by processes outside of the Roman period rather than the Romans truncated there own assemblage
Within the Roman period pottery in pits far outweighs pottery in other context types so on a site by site basis even when all the pottery is amalgamated into one data set and presented in a Pivot table the pottery vs time profile (PTP) you get pretty much the same story
a Gresham street site
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this pattern repeated all over the city.
Lion Plaza
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what is the
context of the pottery? all the pottery on said site or in the case of the city all the pottery in the city
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same story
However what happens if we sub context and divide the data up by some sort of interpretive type? (truth vs facts and all that theory sh1te?)
if we can find a site were the movement of roman pottery by latter truncating events was limited could we divide the roman assemblage for that site into two basic
sub contexts. at GSJ06 (the blue graph) the dating was contained in discrete spikes by context which means the pottery had not mixed too much by date and residual pottery could be traced in plan to its source with some degree of confidence. this was attempted and then divided into two basic groups classified by
MECHANISM
1.pottery someone had collected and thrown into a pit for disposal called
mass disposal
2. pottery that had drifted on the surface and accumulated in the record by accident ie the bit of the assemblage that never made it to the bin... we will call this
casual disposal
the casual disposal assemblage at GSJ06?
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ok well somewhat a different story. The amount of pottery being dropped on the ground is actually going up!
combined with a conservative analysis that over represents early pottery this sub division of the assemblage creates a disturbing alternate view point.
at this point we wanted to compare other sites but the site specific criteria and lets face the money thing stopped that in its tracks... I was told in not so many words not to pursue this line of inquiry because attempting to place this site in context with the greater whole of the londinium record was outside the remit of site specific goals.
then how do you answer the question? if you predicate that a lack of post 2nd Cent culture artifacts is an indication of declining population then you are always going to find it because there is a lack of late roman material
your trapped in a circular argument. if you are confined to analyzing the site in a vacuum what answer do you get?
This context can be thought of as a real entity that can be identified in the record. In this instance we are looking for the mechanism for bulk disposal. This mechanism is a “thing “or piece of “data” as important as the volume of some certain dated topology of pottery. Attaching a numerical value to a certain volume of material is in of it self an incomplete analysis of that volumes meaning. But here is the thing, the context or meaning of the volume data in this essay may only be apparent after an investigation that includes the entire Roman city and its environs as the study area. Consider this. A study that is site specific will in all likelihood always produce a pottery profile that shows a dearth of later material and the intellectual expedition to search for the mechanism for later Roman waste disposal may not be a salient issue in the mind of those responsible. Why should they think bulk waste disposal is an issue they need to address? There is a unstated almost subconscious assumption that these sorts of activities or mechanisms are located “somewhere else” off site. Therefore the dearth of late roman pottery equates to a decline in the population of London. Criticisms of site specific surveys seem to end with the admission that it produces a reduced view or an incomplete view. Rarely, in fact never is it suggested that this site specific methodology will produce and reinforce the wrong conclusion or as in this case produce a polar opposite conclusion
SAME DATA two different ways of interpreting that data..
TWO DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE CONCLUSIONS
a real world example...not some airy fairy theoretical mumbo jumbo and its a problem that will not go away
I was specifically told not to pursue this as it is blowing the budget (not a personnel fault of anyone more a systemic failure of resource procurement and allocation)
but I did anyway
casual investigation reveals several game changing facts relating to
context
they main one is that the bulk of all the late roman pottery is casual in source and there appears to be no rubbish disposal mechanism on par with the back filling of early quarry features
if you look across the entire city and realize this missing mechanism does not exist anywhere the argument that the lack of pottery equates to a decline in population and economic activity falls on its head.
why?
Because for the PTP to equate at both ends of time to some roughly liner realtionship to activity above ground and the mass disposal mechanism must be in action at both ends. The late roman pottery disposal method must be there for us to see.This mechanisim must have been deliberate area dispersion akin to disposing of dirt down their togas like POWS from "The Great Escape" ie absurd!
The different scale of study area and context produces a diametrically opposite conclusion.
now is that proven? NO but there is a lot of evidence already published to suggest we ought to be looking into it
But we don't because a reinvestigation of other sites data ist VERBOTTEN and all the published reports have not collated the data in a useful manner because they where all strait jacket by the same issues.. even a PHD student with a fat grant is going to be hard pressed to untangle this mess in 6000 lifetimes.. commercial archaeology simply is not reflexive enough to address this sort of issue which if properly organised could build the data up incrementally rather han bury the data leaving future generations the almost impossible task of data mining the relavent "facts"and you are going to be trapped in a circle where you are going to left asking is the absence of evidence evidence of absence?
[video=youtube;1UIVPC8gcl4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UIVPC8gcl4[/video]
I strongly suspect that in hindsight our liner thinking that all too often assumes changing quantitative data has some direct one to one relationship to changing activity above ground is going to appear so comically childish.
