7th September 2011, 05:23 PM
P Prentice Wrote:i stand by what i said - i've seen mounties crumble when faced with an experienced consultants argument
100% excavation - thats my favourite strategy
If something's going to be completely destroyed by a development, I'd always start from the position that 100% excavation will be needed. After all, it will be the only chance to recover information from the site before it's entirely removed, so if it's not fully excavated, there's always the possibility that its interpretation will be based on an unrepresentative subset of the evidence available (ie, taking out the other half of that pit may produce the single sherd of pottery that demonstrates the site was occupied 1000 years earlier than previously thought). Percentage sampling may be useful at the evaluation stage, as it allows the contractor to assess the nature and significance of features present on the site, and so provide an indication to the developer of the time and cost likely to be needed to excavate it, but if the development proceeds to the next stage, I'd assume that we'd need to fully excavate everything that's going to be destroyed.
In this regard, I've seen some piss-poor academic strategies, along the lines of 'we've excavated 5% of the pits on the site, we now fully understand what's going on, and it handily supports the contention made in the director's PhD'. Of course this is not the case on all academic sites, but I'd go along with the suggestion made above that you get good and bad fieldwork in the academic sector, just as in the commercial.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum