15th October 2011, 12:10 PM
GnomeKing Wrote:Dino : i like your attitude - logical methods and problem solving are a key to (good) field archaeology.
Decades of having to get sites/reports past management and curators who ask awkward questions! - long since figured it was easier to have the answers in advance, plus a few in reserve that they hadn't thought of. :face-approve:
My approach to most sites is to work from the final report backwards (obviously this is an ever-changing, but when I'm getting someone to dig a hole I'm always thinking ahead to the final product) - what information/graphics/photos/specialist reports etc am I going to need to not end up looking like a total t*t. Being aware of all the relevent research agendas etc is an advantage, what might be of interest to other archaeologists or the client, that can have a significant impact on what to dig/not dig and to what extent, how much and in what way [on a recent job we spent a day digging a dump of crockery out of Victorian cesspit which probably otherwise wouldn't have been dug so the client will have something to put in a display case once the development's finished]. If you know in advance that you're going to be digging a henge, read the literature first, too late in PX to realise that you should have been dedicating site resources to looking for burials etc external/coaxial to the entrances (and visiting curators are less likely to give you a hard time once they realise you know your stuff and can quote parallels etc at them). Smoothed things considerably this summer when I was immediately on discovery able to say 'that timber circle is way up there in diameter/complexity/geometry, there are only so-many known, they generally date from such-and-such time period' etc - cut straight through any discussions about what to then do with it. Plan any science in advance as far as possible (and know what's available, what's likely to work where etc, the practicalities and what you're likely to get out of it, always with an eye to value-for-money and what the client is likley to be prepared to pay for) - the job I just finished is on a bit of landscape where we've had bitter experiences in the past of charcoal etc barely surviving (turns out we were right!) so I got OSL written-in from the outset as a fall-back option. Negative evidence is important, if you're going to need to say that something wasn't there you need to be able to demonstrate that and explain why