1st July 2010, 12:49 PM
Training's never going to beat experience, you almost never, ever, find what the DBA/PD/whatever said was going to be there, so need the knowledge to know what the h*** it is you have just found and whether it's significant, certainly in my own limited experience it's nothing-WBs where I've found swords, dead vikings etc etc. Being able to recognise all parts of the fragmented human skeleton is always handy, which unless you've done a palaeopathology MSc is only going to come from digging a hundred or two and then washing several hundred more (I've just been washing some and it's patently obvious that the average digger couldn't tell human bone if their lives depended on it, judging by all the animal bone and other (non-bone) finds labelled up as parts of the human anatomy, and the slightly wierd distribution of body parts into some of the bags). With reference to the parallel thread, it would be interesting to know how many dead foetuses and neonates have been missed over the years because they were assumed to be dead rabbits/dogs etc. How many of you reading this can honestly claim to be able to tell frags of Roman brike/tile from the post-med stuff it's often mixed up with, etc, etc?