4th April 2010, 12:51 PM
Geli
I concur. I think a lot of the problem is that new graduates/diggers (and even some quite experienced ones) don't seem to have ever read any excavation reports and hence don't have any idea what they should be recording and why (other than blindly following any prompts on their recording sheets). I did a straw-poll amongst a cabin full of crew a few years back and none of them had ever read a site report! A common one seems to be people e.g. just drawing their own ditch section without it ever crossing their minds to maybe add a couple of lines to link it up to the next person's on the plan, definite lack of joined-up thinking (is that a pun?). There seems to be an awful lot of pointless minutiae recorded though - frankly when I come to write the whole think up I really don't care about the detailed climatic conditions (barring flooding stopping play) and I've experienced one guy who on at least one job wrote more scoring the standard of the machine-stripping than he did about the archaeology underneath.....the challenge is to break people out of their own little worlds, step back and understand that the small spot where they are working is part of a greater whole which needs recording accordingly?
Does all that make sense? If not it's probably due to lack of carrot juice, am having to take the old-fashioned black coffee and bacon butty approach to wellness today
I concur. I think a lot of the problem is that new graduates/diggers (and even some quite experienced ones) don't seem to have ever read any excavation reports and hence don't have any idea what they should be recording and why (other than blindly following any prompts on their recording sheets). I did a straw-poll amongst a cabin full of crew a few years back and none of them had ever read a site report! A common one seems to be people e.g. just drawing their own ditch section without it ever crossing their minds to maybe add a couple of lines to link it up to the next person's on the plan, definite lack of joined-up thinking (is that a pun?). There seems to be an awful lot of pointless minutiae recorded though - frankly when I come to write the whole think up I really don't care about the detailed climatic conditions (barring flooding stopping play) and I've experienced one guy who on at least one job wrote more scoring the standard of the machine-stripping than he did about the archaeology underneath.....the challenge is to break people out of their own little worlds, step back and understand that the small spot where they are working is part of a greater whole which needs recording accordingly?
Does all that make sense? If not it's probably due to lack of carrot juice, am having to take the old-fashioned black coffee and bacon butty approach to wellness today