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These repositories should have proper grown up curators. A little while back we were supposed to get upset that the museum of London was getting rid of some curators. In as much that this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curator
is what a curator might do if the term had not be bastardised by civil servant planners. I cant say that I recognise anybody ?involved with the interpretation of heritage material? in my local museum.. Maybe you have to ask? is it a museum if it does not have curators in it who cover the whole of the finds in it.
As it stands bundling up the whole archive into one washed and wrapped package only really enables the museums get rid of their curators. Without curators there will be nobody to study the material and there is no point to archiving anything..
Reason: your past is my past
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At work we're sitting on an archive consisting mainly of a kiln assemblage of 4.5 tons of bits of late medieval cisterns and.....errr...more very similar late medieval cisterns......oh, and one whole one. Strangely no one seems to be terribly interested in taking the archive, but then what's the point of keeping it all anyway? Keep a few form sherds (and the whole one) and frankly the rest could go as heritage hard-core (recycling being the big thing these days) without having any effect whatsoever on our knowledge of late medieval pottery production :face-stir:
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Dino, I don't understand this. Why wasn't a sampling strategy agreed beforehand? Why don't you implement one before you deposit the archive? Did you consider deposition issues during post-ex assessment? Was the receiving museum involved with the design of the sampling strategy? Did you even ask them if you could deposit beforehand and if you did, did you warn them what the archive might include? You must have had some idea from your evaluations of the site.
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What? U never get unexpected stuff turning up? How boring!....hope that you're not one of those people who do watching briefs sitting in the car reading the paper half a mile away (or occasionally catching up on some sleep)...and I've seen a few!!!!!!!!! I've always specialised in finding stuff that wasn't meant to be there, things like big cemeteries with oodles of shiny that evaluation missed always seems to upset the management and client and provide entertainment in an otherwise drab world :face-approve:
Current job's a bit different in that the client wasn't prepared to shell out for any eval (we already knew there was going to be plenty of archaeology from APs etc), so are now paying the penalty for all the extras that have turned up
Luckily that particular pot kiln isn't my problem
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To be fair Dino.......wasn't that site dug ages ago. The museum probably had cuts imposed at a later date.
Has the post-ex finished? I suspect that after analysis and reporting the assemblage would be reduced before deposition?
Not sure though.....not my project either.
But yer right, don't think there was an evaluation there as such. Wasn't it all found during monitoring (it was a pipeline).
Oo by they way, found any neolithic houses at yur site yet?
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The houses are clearly lurking in the same alternative universe as all the finds, never known so much excavation of Grade A1 archaeology with nothing in it! :face-crying:
Lots of undated 'ritual' wierdness though :face-approve:
Notice I carefully didn't mention my medieval kiln assemblage that's been occupying valuable storage space since 1996...... :face-crying:
