1st July 2010, 03:28 PM
isnt what is wrong is that from a producing archaeology point of view is that it is a massive waste of an experienced archaeologist doing a watching brief unless there is a bloody good archaeological reason and if there was a good archaeological reason why is it a watching brief. As far as I am concerned monitoring (it is verboten to call them watching briefs) should be abolished as a mitigation strategy. What needs to be looked at is the numbers of monitorings that resulted in significant finds leading to excavation,- is it less than 3%? -and the number of negatives, is it–80%? I think that if these were quantified it would be very apparent that they are ridicules wastes of money in proportion to what they produce. What we would find is that the ones in the middle were where we went to look at a feature that we already knew was there which could have been tackled before the development schedule.
Yes you will always find things that were not expected but so what, thats a feature of virtually any hole in the ground. What seems to be going on is that the curators are relying on, you will find something, it might not have been what we expected but its not really significant but just enough to make a condition seem a reasonable gambit, on the safe side.
If you were a salaried archaeologist working from an imaginary museum you would not go out and do watching briefs. You might drop in somewhere if you happened to know that some works were cutting some interesting alignment –town wall, ditch, even then you would probably ask the developer to call you when they dug the feature and if they forgot to call you it probably would not have been the end of the world.
Yes you will always find things that were not expected but so what, thats a feature of virtually any hole in the ground. What seems to be going on is that the curators are relying on, you will find something, it might not have been what we expected but its not really significant but just enough to make a condition seem a reasonable gambit, on the safe side.
If you were a salaried archaeologist working from an imaginary museum you would not go out and do watching briefs. You might drop in somewhere if you happened to know that some works were cutting some interesting alignment –town wall, ditch, even then you would probably ask the developer to call you when they dug the feature and if they forgot to call you it probably would not have been the end of the world.