29th May 2005, 08:29 PM
All well and good, but what is considered "significant" varies depending on where you are working. I once tried to contact the curator when I found what I considered significant archaeology in a WB in a region that shall remain nameless. My boss even supported me. But said curator was unreachable, and the job was finished long before he was finally reached 3 days later. What then? I now don't bother because it has been made clear to me that complex archaeology, that most field archaeologist would consider significant, is not seen that way in the eyes of that curator. My reports make it quite clear the archaeology that has been lost to the development, but not once has the curator come back to me and said "that should perhaps have been stopped". The message is quite clear that he does not consider it significant enough.
I'm sympathetic enough to understand that most curators are overworked, but not being able to reach them means that the WB can never be stopped regardless of findings. Now most of the WB's I do in this region are like this. Negative ones are an extreme rarity. It's not even as if these are sites where nothing is expected. I'm talking about medieval villages or towns near to the church.
The worst part about it is that in most of said curators WB WSI's the archaeologist is not even expected to be present until AFTER trenches are dug, and is only required to view open foundations. To canny developers that's great, they don't even notify us until just before the concrete goes in. How would I stop those jobs?
On a slightly different tack can any curators out there tell me what the value of a watching brief after an evaluation is? I've seen plenty of largely urban evaluations with seemingly good archaeology present only followed up with a watching brief where of course the results are much poorer. Surely I can't justify stopping a watching brief like that, as the curator had all the necessary information from the evaluation phase. In those cases it would take me weeks if not months to dig all the affected features, so I end up digging the first 2 or 3 and recording all the rest in section.
Is it perhaps that the region in which I work is so staggeringly full of archaeology that the rules that apply elsewhere just don't here? The unwritten rule here is the archaeologist works around the developers and does not stop them for anything short of a body or a mosaic.
After reading some of the views on this thread I'm very very confused as to what curators actually expect, and I'm convinced it varies massively region to region. Perhaps you should compare notes.[?]
I'm sympathetic enough to understand that most curators are overworked, but not being able to reach them means that the WB can never be stopped regardless of findings. Now most of the WB's I do in this region are like this. Negative ones are an extreme rarity. It's not even as if these are sites where nothing is expected. I'm talking about medieval villages or towns near to the church.
The worst part about it is that in most of said curators WB WSI's the archaeologist is not even expected to be present until AFTER trenches are dug, and is only required to view open foundations. To canny developers that's great, they don't even notify us until just before the concrete goes in. How would I stop those jobs?
On a slightly different tack can any curators out there tell me what the value of a watching brief after an evaluation is? I've seen plenty of largely urban evaluations with seemingly good archaeology present only followed up with a watching brief where of course the results are much poorer. Surely I can't justify stopping a watching brief like that, as the curator had all the necessary information from the evaluation phase. In those cases it would take me weeks if not months to dig all the affected features, so I end up digging the first 2 or 3 and recording all the rest in section.
Is it perhaps that the region in which I work is so staggeringly full of archaeology that the rules that apply elsewhere just don't here? The unwritten rule here is the archaeologist works around the developers and does not stop them for anything short of a body or a mosaic.
After reading some of the views on this thread I'm very very confused as to what curators actually expect, and I'm convinced it varies massively region to region. Perhaps you should compare notes.[?]