Thornborough "debate"

[Real Job]

quoteloughing causes damage at a variety of scales, from individual artefacts to whole sites and entire landscapes. Some of our most fragile monuments and landscapes are suffering badly.
In the intensively farmed east of England few sites have escaped mutilation... The distinctive prehistoric archaeology of our Downs and Wolds has also been devastated. Hundreds of burial mounds... have been ploughed away or damaged. Prehistoric field systems, once a common feature on our chalk hills, now survive only as isolated fragments. Even apparently robust sites, such as masonry-built Roman villas, are suffering serious damage as the mechanical power of farm equipment continues to increase.

From EH's 'Ripping up history' http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/uploa...istory.pdf

quote:Nevertheless, the schemes [the various countryside stewardship grants] have been largely unsuccessful in dealing with sites under arable cultivation, mainly because payments were unattractive compared to farm subsidies for continuing and intensifying production

From the IFA Yearbook 2004. http://www.archaeologists.net/modules/ic...04trow.pdf

Given that there is no means currently of preventing farmers from ploughing sites (even scheduled monuments), is 'preservation in situ' a viable option on any arable site, not just at Ladybridge Farm?

Preservation in situ is intended to protect archaeological remains for the forseeable future. As has been said already on this thread, we have all worked on sites crossed by plough scars and with truncated archaeology, but the point is that such sites were excavated and preserved by record not left to be slowly destroyed.

I know that EH want the law and/or the stewardship grant system changed to protect archaeology, but is such a change imminent (does anyone know?)? Can we preserve in situ sites on the assumption that something may be done at an unknown date in the future to protect them from plough damage?

Unless something more encouraging is forthcoming from EH or the government about the prospects for changing the law, I would rather excavate now than lose archaeology forever.



"So does your partner have a real job?" Asked of me by an interviewer for a supervisor post at a well known unit not that many years ago...