26th May 2005, 03:01 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by vulpes
Is your apparent addiction to paper a side effect of working for a local authority bureaucracy Curator Kid? Good practice does not in my opinion dictate endless repetition and duplication in the case of negative trenches - as anyone who has ever undertaken a large and largely negative evaluation would realise. This comment just marks you out as yet another curator totally out of touch with the practicalities of conducting archaeological fieldwork.
As for Single Context recording, well it's 'horses for courses'. Although it is great in complex, deeply stratified 'urban' situations, it is unecessary and cumbersome on extensive 'rural' sites.
Addicted to paper? Hmm. I think not!
A "largely negative evaluation" (say, topsoil, subsoil & natural being the only sequence in most trenches), still can have things to say! If there's only cursory record, then that lessens the chances of using the information later to try and assess why the site was largely negative and how this fits in with the wider area. I take your point about endless repetition, and that wasn't what I meant at all (thanks for the support Achingknees!), but at some point on any site, information still needs to be supplied, in order to then take an informed and justifiable archaeological decision not to endlessly repeat it if the same deposits are encountered again.
I have worked on large and largely (or completely!) negative evaluations in the past, on timescale-tight developer-funded sites, and pretty boring most of them were too. But I still did the planning and levelling and photographing of the trenches to the required standards set out in the WSI, and filled in the sheets where new information was forthcoming - such as recording the changes in the natural across areas. It's all potentially useful stuff if you are evaluating areas adjacent to known sites, or in the context of wider prehistoric landscapes for example. Enabling reassessment at a later date is a key consideration too as Monitor Lizard says (Hi ML - I think you enjoyed the stupid 50-60cm foundation trench site as much as I did!). As for being out of touch with the practicalities of conducting archaeological fieldwork - well I'm happy to be so if it means that I can continue to work against poor resourcing, inadequate timescales, overbearing developers and potential drops in standards.
Going back to Single Context Recording, I agree it can be a cumbersome system on rural sites, and works best on stratified urban deposits. I can't say I'd bother to record a drain like the one Invisible Man describes either - definitely use Museum of London truncation lines there! For a rural prehistoric site I was involved with a while ago, a distinction was made between SC Planning, and SC Recording. This involved collecting the same feature context data (easy to fill in matrix boxes!), but only used a single site plan rather than wasting time on seperate planning sheets. Obviously if any stratification of features was encountered, overlays could be added. It seemed a common-sense approach. It did rather spoil the flip-book thing fun though.