Are Standards in field Archaeology Slipping

[P Prentice]

whereforartwerethou standards harked back to foreverwards? dostthou refer to yon oldendays of yawn wherein diversely capable archies did plunderon goodly through diverse monuments and cropmarkets in pursuit of the inedible, closely followed by yon ministry of funnywalks and dead parrots? any of us who have had occasion to reexcavate an earlier excavation can probably tell some tales and any of us who have been in search of an archive can probably wish we never found it. there have always been rubbish excavations and people continue to reference them as if they were infallible. now there are thousands of us plundering away digging pitiful percentages and writing pitiful interpretations making it slightly more difficult to pick through the miasma. maybe we need less venal decontamination and fewer excavators so we can do more archaeology

[Sikelgaita]

whereforartwerethou standards harked back to foreverwards? dostthou refer to yon oldendays of yawn wherein diversely capable archies did plunderon goodly through diverse monuments and cropmarkets in pursuit of the inedible, closely followed by yon ministry of funnywalks and dead parrots?

Aha! I have always suspected that you and Unitof1 were one and the same and here, finally, is the written proof.

[BAJR]

laugh out loud funny posts. Perhaps standards can be bettered if we are poetic in our bewailing

[Dinosaur]

Have to admit that, on occasion, the old ways are not always the best - was watching a guy on site yesterday hunting out any missing hobnails in one of those tricky graves where the feet were jammed up at the end, and thinking that poking away for hours with a teeny dental probe was probably marginally less efficient than e.g. mattocking the whole thing into a few sample tubs and sieving it later...

[Marc Berger]

Or using a detector of metal?

[Sikelgaita]

Or using a detector of metal?

Very badly corroded metal is not necessarily picked up by a metal detector.

[P Prentice]

nor in a sieve............

[Dinosaur]

Or using a detector of metal?

Detectors are sh**e on gravel sites around there, seen a serious detectorist with good kit be unable to 'find' a big Fe buckle and two AS small-long brooches on a cleaned skelly on a site half a mile away

[Marc Berger]

I once dug on a cemetery site. They only let me near one grave which I would like to suggest was selected at random. I dug mine and metal detected as I went. The other people didn't metal detect and they were such good diggers that they attempted to dig them in a day or so. I mostly remember finding a single tooth high up in the backfill. Heres a "buy product" of the as yet unpublished final report with the title "Excavations at the Hospital of St Mary Magdalen, Partney, Lincolnshire, 2003". You can find it for sale here, I wasn't asked to contribute apart from presumably my context sheets, one of the main authors was not on site and nor were the rest of the "contributors: http://www.biab.ac.uk/contents/200951 you can also buy a copy here http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/abs/10.11...0370815896 says its been downloaded 109 times in the last 12 months, I wonder what that might add up to over the next seventy years.. I cant say that I am registered with any of these sites so I don't know what it costs to get a copy, Presumably I have been paid for all my self employed efforts and don't seem to have any copyrights. It was a road scheme funded by government and council money. Anyway if you are rich enough to purchase a copy, can you workout which grave I dug?

Thing about standards is that it can sometimes make you stick out like a sore thumb at a wedding or rather I would like to imagine Pippa Middleton's derrière.

[P Prentice]

Detectors are sh**e on gravel sites around there, seen a serious detectorist with good kit be unable to 'find' a big Fe buckle and two AS small-long brooches on a cleaned skelly on a site half a mile away

never seen a detector that could work from half a mile away..........

still sounds like rubbish detecting though