standards anyone?

[Marcus Brody]

Marcus - what would be your view of a site where the strategy effectively involved re-design of the development and sacrificing c.5% (actually probably less) of the archaeology with only minimal excavation mainly restricted to the top of the archaeological sequence, and a follow-up watching brief, in order to preserve the remainder 'in situ' - a compromise devised between the consultant, client and county (although a little upsetting as the contractor watching beautiful stratigraphy being machined out, had to go and console myself checking the footing/piling plans to reassure myself that the damage wasn't as catastrophic as it looked). Any higher level of intervention would have (a) destroyed more of the archaeology, albeit with more paper record, and (b) potentially killed off a worthwhile educational development, PP's 'standard' of a 100% sample was certainly never going to happen, unfortunately

It's difficult to say without knowing all the specifics of the site, but I've certainly also been involved with projects where similar compromises were adopted. Like you, I would be uncomfortable watching layers of stratigraphy being machined off without any real record, and I would probably have pushed to have these sequences excavated and recorded by hand (though I don't know the nature of the site or the amount of additional work that this would have involved).

You say that any additional cost would have potentially have killed off a worthwhile educational development. In most cases, if a developer were to come to me and say 'we can't afford to deal with the archaeology, it'll make the whole project unprofitable', my view would be that if they can't afford to deal with the archaeology correctly, they shouldn't go ahead with the development. However, I'm aware that the various planning guidance documents (in Scotland at least) indicate that the planner should balance archaeology against other considerations, and I'd imagine that this is what happened in the situation you describe - the planner will have looked at the archaeological costs, balanced these against the social benefits of the educational resource, and come to the conclusion that the benefits of the development were such that it should go ahead. They'd then presumably go to their archaeological advisor and ask them for advice on what sort of excavation strategy would allow the recovery of sufficient information to be useful, without being so extensive that it made the development unaffordable. This sort of argument generally seems to be more easily accepted by planners where the development has some sort of social benefit - a new school, hospital etc - rather than where it's a commercial house-building company complaining that the archaeological costs mean that their profits will be reduced.

I'd also say that the aim of redesigning a scheme to allow archaeology to be preserved in situ is generally in accord with the various (Scottish) planning policies, and again, I've been involved in schemes where this has been done. I'm always slightly concerned that developers view it as a cheap way of addressing the issue, and often don't appear to take it seriously. I worry that even when they've been told that a particular area should be excluded from development, they'll use it for a site compound, or run heavy plant across it. I've also anecdotally heard about cases where the archaeologist is on site to monitor the excavation of foundation tracks to an agreed depth, and leaves site when this has been done. The engineer then comes on, looks at the foundation trenches and says 'that deposit's not load-bearing, we'll need to take it down till we reach a solid formation level'. The main contractor then digs out another 500mm through archaeological layers that were theoretically preserved in situ without bothering to get the archaeologist out again. And that's not to mention the effect on the survival of archaeological material preserved below buildings resulting from the effect on the hydrology of the site