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18th October 2012, 09:21 AM
Might let you off on rock - as long as the bedding-planes look ok. Anyway chalk's easy, get yourself an antler pick and call it 'experimental archaeology'. A lot of stuff gets missed on gravel site evaluations since gravel-filled features can often only be recognised in plan over a larger area -some of the stuff on my pet quarry can only be seen from 30m away in the right light and from the top of a topsoil bund for instance, and a few things have only been recognised from kite photos, couldn't see a thing close up at ground level (this includes a major timber circle, scary what must get missed on a lot of sites!)
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18th October 2012, 01:37 PM
i once walked across an open gravel site and stood in the middle of a gravel filled feature and asked the spo 'what do you intend to do with this?' to which they replied 'what?', and i 'this massive pit under my feet', and they 'what are you talking about?' and i 'f..f..sake are you blind?, they 'why have you come here to cause trouble?' and i 'its not like chalk, you have to look for it', and when i drew a line around it they said 'f...f..sake'!!
in my younger days a gave a pre ex site tour to the EH inspector and whilst i was waxing lyrically over all the lovely neolithic ditches they said 'i cant see anything at all!'
and whilst i'm here - once as a mounty, i asked the evaluation po what they were going to do with all the furrows they had left in? 'what furrows?' was the reposte
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers
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18th October 2012, 01:44 PM
I remember a site from London where a supervisor excavated a row of 'empty' graves.....turned out they had excavated the undisturbed strat between the graves and the 'balks' all contained intact burials. Bit of a shock to discover this on the penulitmate day of the excavation.....
With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind all passion spent...
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18th October 2012, 03:37 PM
its always a pig when nobodies home......
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18th October 2012, 08:43 PM
Not sure why, but gravel-filled features seem to show best in low diffuse light when slightly damp (ie very light dew, not rain) - sorry, I'm sad enough to like turning up on site an hour before the minions roll up, so this probably isn't a good technique for the ever-multiplying clock-watchers. Think I've mentioned somehwhere on here before that shorter wider trenches tend to find more features per square metre than long thin ones, the bog-standard bucket-width/2m wide machine trenches are rubbish, 3m minimum, 5 is better -and a good test for the machine driver :face-stir:
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19th October 2012, 11:23 AM
Dinosaur Wrote:, 3m minimum, 5 is better -and a good test for the machine driver
always supposing the natural is flat!!
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers
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19th October 2012, 01:06 PM
Couple of thousand years of farmers tend to have a flattening effect? And its a wacky site where theres much change within the confines of a trial trench. Hopefully of course you're not machining below the highest points in the natural anyway (although as discussed on here previously some outfits seem to have a habit of doing that anyway presumably to cut down on pesky archaeology). Since, as noted by PP above, the art of identifying R&F seems to be disappearing, following the top of 'natural' and machining out furrow bases is probably over-ambitious....
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19th October 2012, 05:25 PM
not everywhere has been farmed - but it sounds like it has if you've been there}
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers
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20th October 2012, 10:10 PM
Put my foot down years ago so don't do that up-in-the-hills stuff (where's the finds?). Of course all urban should be done from the top by hand (since its all archaeology, and smashing out concrete by hand sorts out the men/women/things from the boys/girls/smaller things), service replacement/repair is usually just a case of recording the sections in someone else's trench, so quite a lot of what's left tends to be in someone's heavily plough-truncated field?
