standards anyone?

[Marcus Brody]

Marcus - what would be your view of a site where the strategy effectively involved re-design of the development and sacrificing c.5% (actually probably less) of the archaeology with only minimal excavation mainly restricted to the top of the archaeological sequence, and a follow-up watching brief, in order to preserve the remainder 'in situ' - a compromise devised between the consultant, client and county (although a little upsetting as the contractor watching beautiful stratigraphy being machined out, had to go and console myself checking the footing/piling plans to reassure myself that the damage wasn't as catastrophic as it looked). Any higher level of intervention would have (a) destroyed more of the archaeology, albeit with more paper record, and (b) potentially killed off a worthwhile educational development, PP's 'standard' of a 100% sample was certainly never going to happen, unfortunately

It's difficult to say without knowing all the specifics of the site, but I've certainly also been involved with projects where similar compromises were adopted. Like you, I would be uncomfortable watching layers of stratigraphy being machined off without any real record, and I would probably have pushed to have these sequences excavated and recorded by hand (though I don't know the nature of the site or the amount of additional work that this would have involved).

You say that any additional cost would have potentially have killed off a worthwhile educational development. In most cases, if a developer were to come to me and say 'we can't afford to deal with the archaeology, it'll make the whole project unprofitable', my view would be that if they can't afford to deal with the archaeology correctly, they shouldn't go ahead with the development. However, I'm aware that the various planning guidance documents (in Scotland at least) indicate that the planner should balance archaeology against other considerations, and I'd imagine that this is what happened in the situation you describe - the planner will have looked at the archaeological costs, balanced these against the social benefits of the educational resource, and come to the conclusion that the benefits of the development were such that it should go ahead. They'd then presumably go to their archaeological advisor and ask them for advice on what sort of excavation strategy would allow the recovery of sufficient information to be useful, without being so extensive that it made the development unaffordable. This sort of argument generally seems to be more easily accepted by planners where the development has some sort of social benefit - a new school, hospital etc - rather than where it's a commercial house-building company complaining that the archaeological costs mean that their profits will be reduced.

I'd also say that the aim of redesigning a scheme to allow archaeology to be preserved in situ is generally in accord with the various (Scottish) planning policies, and again, I've been involved in schemes where this has been done. I'm always slightly concerned that developers view it as a cheap way of addressing the issue, and often don't appear to take it seriously. I worry that even when they've been told that a particular area should be excluded from development, they'll use it for a site compound, or run heavy plant across it. I've also anecdotally heard about cases where the archaeologist is on site to monitor the excavation of foundation tracks to an agreed depth, and leaves site when this has been done. The engineer then comes on, looks at the foundation trenches and says 'that deposit's not load-bearing, we'll need to take it down till we reach a solid formation level'. The main contractor then digs out another 500mm through archaeological layers that were theoretically preserved in situ without bothering to get the archaeologist out again. And that's not to mention the effect on the survival of archaeological material preserved below buildings resulting from the effect on the hydrology of the site

[Marcus Brody]

Done plenty of urban, including ?1M+ jobs (and that was back in the 80s when ?1M went towards a really big hole), and never yet seen one that didn't involve some machining, even on TV. Do people still break out concrete and empty rubble-filled cellars by hand then?

100% excavation doesn't necessarily mean that it all has to be done by hand, I'd say it should be done using the most appropriate tools for the job. In the case of breaking out concrete, this would mean using a pecker, while I'd have no problem with a machine being used to clear a rubble-filled cellar. If the 'big yellow trowel' is under archaeological direction, and if the material removed is recorded, I would view it as a sensible strategy to adopt, particularly on a commercial site where time is likely to be tight, and where the developer is unlikely to be happy for you to spend three weeks emptying a cellar by hand, only to then go back to them and say that you need another three weeks because you spent so long on the cellar that you didn't manage to complete the medieval building below. In a perfect world, maybe everything would be excavated by hand, but on a commercial site, it's likely to be a question of making the best use of the resources available to ensure that the project aims are accomplished.

[Dinosaur]

Don't worry dino, I've seen your digging, and it's passable, even though your sections were not as straight as I'd have liked! :face-stir: hahahahahaaaaahahaaaaha

Can never find a bit of string long enough

Usually reasonably vertical though, saves drawing extra lines on the plan. Have always believed that a 2m square trench should be that size at the bottom, wish my workforce could get that idea...

Will get back to replying to the longer posts later, sorry guys, have to go out in 5

[Dinosaur]

Marcus

I suspect all the 100% on this thread is all for the benefit of PP, so :face-topic:

To explain better the issues with the site I described above:

Evaluation (trial trenching and monitoring of window-sampling) had established that c.1m of post-medieval garden-related deposits overlay around 2m of in-situ medieval deeposits backing onto a castle wall (which was responsible for the substantial depth of stratigraphy). This deposit model can probably be applied in general to all of the gardens behind properties on that side of the street, except where a small number more recent developments can be seen to have taken great bites out of it.

As a response to the results of the evaluation, the building, which had originally been designed with poured-concrete founds down to bedrock (c.3m), was redesigned on the minimum number of 300mm piles (still around 40 though) with all the pile-caps, ground beams etc up within the post-med garden soil horizons. However, due to surviving remains of the castle wall below one end of the development, that end had to be redesigned with a cantilever over the wall. In order to accomodate the cantilever, the post-med material in that area was archaeologically hand-excavated down to 1.2m, which incidentally recorded part of a rather nice 18th century formal garden, in order to provide a lowered construction working area. The contentious part is that the subsequent founds to support the cantilever were then machine-excavated by mini-digger (the only access to the site is via two narrow doorways through a standing building) down to bedrock in a single exercise, the machine being too small and with too limited a reach to go back and do the thing in spits and hence only providing extremely limited opportunities for archaeological recording - I have a pretty good idea what was there but with only limited records to back it up. The resulting trenches were too deep and narrow for access, and in fact the ground proved too unstable to even stand on the sides safely to take measurements in some areas.

On the up-side (and this was the general view taken), the excavation of the founds in this area has merely removed narrow vertical slices through the archaeology leaving significant blocks of material in situ, and the general nature of the excavated deposits across the area appeared to be reasonably consistent. Hand-excavation of the founds would have required removal of c.5 times as much material, allowing for stepping the trenches which would have needed on safety grounds to have been far wider than the machine trenches, and would then have needed shuttering to cast the founds merely to put all the excavated soil back in to support the shuttering! Although painful to watch, as an archaeologist, the machine approach probably caused less damage to the overall archaeological resource than a partial hand-excavation of relatively disconnected bits of it. 100% excavation, given the prevailing 'retain-in-situ' culture, was never going to happen since most of the known archaeology lies below the invert level of the majority of the new structure. Gonna be a b***er to write up though....

Also on the upside, pursuaded them that frankly a compound with grass was generally better than a compound with mud - builders can be reasonable if archaeologists bother to explain things to them, and those ones are a good bunch

[BAJR]

AS this is about standards... and not about other peoples perceived hilarious shortcomings. lets keep it there. So as Dino says. :face-topic:

We all sit in glass houses.

know what I mean?

tip top... on topic

[Dirty Dave Lincoln]

I think before we work out what standards are to be adhered to, we should sort out how to make them en forcible.

[BAJR]

That is indeed the main issue Dave... we know (or should) know what is right, who makes sure we hold to it? And the question also arises - if we need to be checked to make sure we do things right, then should we look at ourselves!?

[dmama]

we know (or should) know what is right, who makes sure we hold to it? And the question also arises - if we need to be checked to make sure we do things right, then should we look at ourselves!?

and that's the nub of it. who do we trust enough to hold the reigns and respect enough to enforce any misdemeanours???