5th August 2011, 08:47 AM
Dinosaur Wrote:...DBAs from another organisation which have consisted of nothing more than HER/NMR printouts without it passing through the authour's mind that maybe some of the sites were a touch larger than the gridpoint given on the HER, and that possibly looking at afew APs etc might have been a good idea....
I've seen so many DBAs of this type, and the question that always comes to mind is 'how much have Company X charged the client for this heap of sh*t?' There does seem to be a view in some companies that DBAs (and environmental statements etc) are money for old rope - get the data from the HER / NMR, bung it in the corporate report template, stick a cover on it and charge the client several thousand pounds for the privilege, without at any point actually engaging with what the information actually represents - real sites on the ground that have a physical extent beyond the 'dot on a map', and may have interrelationships with each other or with other sites beyond the development boundary (to say nothing of the potential for additional unrecorded buried sites whose presence may be inferred by looking at the type, location and number of recorded features). It's often a double waste of money for the client, as the Council archaeologist may take a look at the document, realise that it doesn't tell them anything they couldn't have found from a quick trawl of their own database, and send it back to be done again.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum