23rd March 2011, 01:32 PM
troll Wrote:..... MetroMola are a welcome newcomer to an industry where single context excavation systems are either largely misunderstood or exist in mythological legend. Whilst a goodly few units can have a good crack at single context excavation and do a good job at it, there are plenty of units out there where the mere mention of the system has directors in tears. If we are to be honest, a good proportion of units and archaeologists rarely (if ever) employ single context systems and arguably-such systems are the bread and butter of Mola staff. There`s a USP worth having if ever I`ve seen one. I`ve been on many a site that desperately needed a single context approach and on some where the brief actually demanded it-only to be confronted with a director who thought that he/she could circumvent that by employing evauation techniques. Site gets trashed but hey ho.....time and money was saved. Ended up pulling my own face off in frustration.....
....errr, what exactly are you defining as 'single context recording'? - spending hours in PX looking for a tiny plan of a stake-hole lost somewhere on a A1 sheet of otherwise blank pervytrace? Almost all of the several dozen units I've worked for since the late 1970s have used some derivative of the Single Context system used by the Museum of London, but most units in more rural parts of the universe don't often have the joy of playing in 15m of stratified loveliness, frankly around here it's a bit of a treat to need to do a second overlay plan of something....and a few MOLAS section drawings seem to have more than 1 context depicted, so they're hardly innocent.....people adapt their recording systems to what works for them, as long as the information gets recorded adequately and is understandable to future generations what's wrong with that? Some of those 19th century watercolours of antiquarian finds are frankly often more informative than a lot of modern 'technical' site drawings (and more colourful too). I've had occasion in the past to come up with 'innovative' excavation and recording strategems to deal with tricky situations....just been reading one of the old Cirencester Roman cemetery reports where they were confronted with up to 1.5m of a totally featureless soil horizon with skellies dotted about in it at various depths - funnily enough the 'classic' single context recording system wasn't really applicable.... :face-stir: