Quote:[SIZE=3]hopefully we can divest ourselves of the lottery is dirty money idea.[/SIZE]
Possibly but it is money that comes with an agenda which presumably in this case understands what community archaeology is.
I don’t really understand what the scribed document is supposed to be. Is it an archaeological report? It starts entitled Big Cousland Dig, then The Cousland Local History project.
And then
Quote:[SIZE=3]1.0 SUMMARY A community archaeology project was carried out at the village of Cousland in Midlothian. The sites that formed the investigations were located in a field to the west of Cousland, the environs of the castle and walled garden in the centre of the village and the windmill to the southwest. The work consisted of fi eld walking and geophysical survey with the intention of locating the actual pottery site, geophysics to locate structures in the environs of the castle and walled garden and a metal detecting survey to pinpoint any metal objects in both the walled garden and the field directly to the south of the castle.
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The actual pottery site? Where did that "actual pottery site" come from
Further on
Quote:[SIZE=3]Although mention of a site was first made in 1852, the first known scientific investigation took place in 1957, when “evidence of a number of burials was discovered when digging holes for a fence. One burial was fully excavated and found to be laid in a long cist. There were capstones about 1’ below the surface, and p aving: the sides were of irregular stones, four on each side
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Its all a bit of a mess no references, no bibliography, the contents page refers to a numbered headings but there are also unnumbered headings in the text.
The pottery report
Quote:[SIZE=3]Certainly there is a significant quantity of 18th century pottery from the site in both white creamware and redware bodies, and much of this in the form of kiln furniture
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There appears to be only two pieces of kiln furniture mentioned in the pottery …roundup
Any way there does not appear to be an author, theres no mention of copyright apart for the os, theres no mention of the landownerhip/permissions, the archive the final repository…
From the lottery benefits page I get
Benefits for people
Quote:[SIZE=3]The project was hugely committed to community involvement and more than 60 members of the local community took time to develop archaeology skills and learn more about the history of their area.
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Should I equate this to ?6300/60people=?105 was spent per person of community origin. Any body want to spend ?105 on me (thought not). Possibly this is the wrong way to look at this “project” as it does appear to have covered an incredible amount of archaeological ground beside a SAM which apparently subsequently was involved in development. The documents even got a context register. Is it an example, the real thing what is anybody supposed to do with it?
If you had come to me and asked for a price to do the job and I had said ?6300 I don’t think that I would have been allowed to start based on generating a record for which there would be limited if any fund for post-excavation analysis and what about contingency. Was there any contingency in the HLF funding. Is this really profeesional.