Help With Explaining a Fill

[trowelmonkey]

quote:Originally posted by BAJR Host

I wonder if I should reorganise the forums a bit... and have a questions section... whats this pot... has anyone seen such a weird cut etc...

"I don't have an archaeological imagination.."
Borekickers

Sorry for the long posting, too much caffeine.

Questions already turn up here from time to time and sometimes get answered (sorry, long time lurker), so a forum to gather them seems really useful. Almost everybody I know informally sends photos around when they’re stumped since that’s often the best way to get a point across. Since BAJR is in the public domain this though could have real copyright and client confidentiality issues. Personally, I don’t see a problem with tight shots that don’t give away any extraneous detail, but who would filter them? How do the managers out there feel about this?

May I be audaciously bold and suggest something even more ambitious?

Like many people on this forum I started digging before I went to uni. I went to uni because I naively thought I would learn how sites were formed and how to recognise stuff. This was the last thing we learnt. I remember a slide of an in-filled ditch and a cropmark and that’s about it. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot of new things, but NOT about digging. These days most new diggers don’t seem to have so much experience of even seeing features, a real shame.

Ever so often I have mooted the idea of a book describing typically encountered British archaeological features because I have yet to see a single anything address this in an easily accessible way. Something like the back bit of The Handbook of British Archaeology expanded. I have always been told that this is both unnecessary and impossible since each feature is inherently unique. Yes, I’ve said, this may be so, but surely there is a reason why we recognise a posthole or a cooking pit when we see one. Why is one blobby hole a quarry and another a tree bowl? One has to wade through so much disparate literature to get an idea of how features form and how they behave after that-. Some sources are great for what they do but are limited in scope, such as Carver’s Underneath English Towns. And yet those good sources tend to have mostly nice, crisp line-drawings, very clear for the theory, but what the beginner of any new geology needs are nice, clear photos.

I think many of us have had the less than great experience of starting somewhere new and being sent off on a watching brief straight away with no one to ask what’s normal. Worse yet in the last few years, the big site where there aren’t enough old hands around and the harassed supervisor/PO says “that’s not a posthole, it’s just a pit!” “Why?” quoth the newly graduated with two weeks experience desperate to find something. “Because it isn’t, now get on with it there’s an area to hoe back,” growls the harassed super/PO. (Okay, so I exaggerate a little for wooden dramatic effect, but you know it happens.)

I still think a little guide would be very useful but have come to think that the internet is a much better tool to disseminate this kind of information. Is anybody (bajr?) interested in hosting something like this?

I was inspired by these sites: http://www.wossac.com/projects/photography.cfm and http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects...cfm?myID=0

This would be my wish list:

It ought to be searchable by geology or type, so either “postholes” or “boulder clay”

Common Features:
Postholes; hearths; kilns; furnaces, different types of “natural” which has been exposed to heat; ard marks; storage pits; quarries and the like.

Juicy, slightly complicated things and an explanation why:
Inverted stratigraphy, for example caused by land slip; re-cut ditches (with clearly separate phasing) vs ditches that have been re-dug within their use-life; buried banks; robbed out walls.

Natural features:
Tree throws, tree bowls and the difference between them; palaeochannels; periglacial striations and other local geological oddities (manganese and iron pan too).

And maybe some pre-industrial farming stuff too:
Early field drains, hay stacks (like mini round houses, almost) and local specialities.

It would be really nice if units could donate good, clear photographs with the relevant details, such as the type of feature, why it was recognised as such, the geology of the site and any other info they might wish to share.

Since I’ve not introduced myself properly yet, Hi! This is a great site and I wish it’d been around when I started out!!!! It’s to archaeology as to what sex-ed is to schools!