19th May 2008, 03:51 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by m300572
Parts of Britain (mainy upland areas) have been deep ploughed for forestry at well - huge swathes of the Southern Uplands and Highlands of Scotland, bits of Datmoor for example. Where survey was doine in advance it invariably turned up archaeology but very little of it was actually systematically surveyed.
Anoer destructive ploughing practice in British farming is de-stoning where the top 300mm of soil is passed through a seive to remove stones - mainly for growing root crpos where stones mar the perfection of the supermarket carrot - but the bulk of the stones is removed so the next ploughing goes a little deeper into the undisturbed sub plough layer.
Added to this every hectare of field loses a few tonnes of soil with the roots at harvest - again leading to deper penetration o the plough into undisturbed layers.
Thanks for the comment. I hadn't heard of the sieving practise before. Unfortunately in the case of most early Historic occupations, the stratigraphy just isn't substantial enough to survive the disturbance by logging. It's taken me a while, actually, to get used to the differences in methodology because I was initially trained to use stratigraphy as my first point of information. At a lot of the sites I work on, there simply isn't any. This leads to the presence or not of artifacts being much more heavily weighted than I was originally comfortable with. One of the first things you learn as a student is that context is essential, but we don't have that level of resolution very often, so we have to go with horizontal artifact distribution. We get that by doing very close interval shovel tests (5m sometimes), and recording the artifacts.
I was uncomfortable with this for a long time, until I learned what you can do with distribution maps. I think in the year and a half I have been working in South Carolina I've worked on one site with actual stratigraphy. Occasionally we get sites with features that extend into the subsoil, but even that is rare. So it just requires a totally different approach. I'm going to be back in England for the summer though, on an anglo-saxon site, and it'll be so nice to be able to use a trowel again
I can't wait