oh I need a licence now to dig and I have to use a non existant mandatory made up type series pottery guide lines which no body has authority over. I have to say that all of your argument clinching little anacdotal examples of misidentification have seemed to have missed out their contractual context. Whys that then?
Quote:the Staffordshire Hoard was mainly unstratified
- sorry what archaeological contractual situation is this relevant to. from what I can see it was totally unstratified and they are still getting bits floating up to the surface which would suggest that no real attempt was ever made at excavation. I would shudder to call it archaeology. Did you put the term unstratified in to make it sound archaeological and that somewhere nearby there was some stratified archaeological context?
Quote:If it had been left to us/me, the size of the bones would have suggested a post-med cow and the site would merely have got a couple of sentences in the up-coming publication, along the lines of 'no significant archaeology found in these trenches', rather than spawning a dozen C14 dates and plans for a major up-coming excavation. I think maybe that specialist report was probably cost-effective in the long run?
so you are saying that you got some up and comeing publication out of an evaluation (?) which is now spawning plans for a major excavation of an aurock burial site. Prey tell more as I suspect you are working for a council unit on a pet quarry site where you have a yearly budget and you split it up into doing a bit of evaluation followed by a bit of excavation no matter what the significance or worry about any archaeological compertition.
Quote:My personal recent favourite was a dig near a motte and bailey on the edge of a Roman town. The site supervisor fancied himself as a pot expert, and there he was on the cover of the local paper clutching a complete 'Saxo-Norman' pot and announcing to the world he'd found the (previously unlocated) bailey ditch. I got to look at the same pot a few weeks later (the finds manager smelled a rat) - it was Roman, and so was everything else in the feature. It was a Roman land boundary.
was the "dig" an evaluation or excavation, what was the point of the "dig", where in the planning process was it. Its noticable that in this exacmple that it was a lowly "site supervisor" who presumably has been making these gaffes whilst working thier way up the greasy pole of the wonderful unit (presumably at a unit where the title archaeologist was extremly blurred) but which also has a finds manerger who exhiditing a similar level of competance to the lowly site super was able in the nick of time to smell rat and get a medieval pot specialist to spot that all the pot was Roman. What wonderful greasy poles from which to grease your palms. Now all we need is the romanists to get their two penith worth and get the operations manager in on it and then get a retraction put in the same local news paper. We will all be quids in. and we can still wonder if a roman land boundary may not be a saxon bailey or what the chances of complete roman pot being residual.
Quote:To give an example, someone sent me 6 sherds of med pottery from Reading yesterday, all unglazed, grey/brown and boring. One had a few bits of shell in it, popped it under the microscope, it's London fabric SSW, and the first time it's been found in Reading, altho it's turned up on a few other sites in Berks. Now, I doubt TV crews with be hammering on my door anytime soon, but it's another dot on the distribution map, and a tiny incremental advance in human knowledge. Or they could have given it to a digger and who'd have said '6 sherds of medieval pottery' instead, and saved themselves £10. This is what gets my back up, I think, it's ultimately tiny amounts of money that they're saving.
My friend how about thinking that its tiny amounts of money that they havent got. I think that you should start looking at these sherds in the archaeological contractual setting. And by archaeollgical I mean digging sense. Did that identification have any affect on the contract out comes. Seems to me they probably dont and if so then if you are so concerned with distribution of fabrics then you should get at it through the archieve and in some more academic funded position. (I would also like to take the micheal out of anybody who thinks that they can easily differentiate fabrics around London as I believe that all come from the same deposits and even atomic absorption cannot differentiate them, shell or no meaningless shell).
really this thread should be entitled "Is a decent evaluation specialist report a luxury or if its an excavation specialist report it is too late to worry about decency as any further speculation after the money has run out should be academic."
Lets try again -name me one single pot specialist in a museum. I was hopeing I would get an answer so that I could send all my pot to them and get them identified for free. Ho a bit like sending finds to the PAS, ho sorry I am not allowed to use them either but them they dont realy have any responsiblity for the museums do they. So where are you going to keep the bloody pointless typologies or is that type series? We could turn this into thread entitled "Museums dont realy exist particularly for finds specialists so the finds specialists wonder around making no sense at all".
Never understode why the new year wasnt the day after the winter solstice. I bet I can find a specialist to give me an answer but I bet they will want a living out of it.
Happy New year.