13th December 2011, 01:38 PM
Martin Locock Wrote:I would clarify that yes, I would expect contractors to set themselves high standards of accuracy and presentation as part of their commitment to professionalism, and I also believe that their clients or clients' consultants would be entitled to query a report which was poorly edited. I do not believe that this extends to the curators and the planning process - the report is a planning tool and as long as it provides a valid summary of the archaeological resource then that is enough, warts and all.
Incidentally it should be remembered that grey literature reports used to be much lighter on the detailed data, but curators raised the bar by requesting the inclusion of full content catalogues and stratigraphic accounts so they could check the validity of the conclusions. This seemed like madness at the time, and even more so now, when any field evaluation's entire site records could be included as databases on a flash drive in the back of a report.
The 'grey literature' report is often the final product of the archaeological process. Why shouldn't it be of the highest quality?
Any final report should be capable of being critically assessed by the archaeological community without having to dig out what remains of the archive from the ever-decreasing storage space.
Conclusions and interpretations should always be backed by evidence, which in archaeology is usually a photo, section drawing and/or plan etc.
The accuracy and presentation of reports should ABSOLUTELY be in the remit of the curators..........I have seen what happens when it is not. All the 'public' (and the industry) get as a final report is some wishy-washy non-referenced made up rubbish with little relevance to the excavated material and an apparently well-packaged archive that turns out to be a few scraps of paper and poorly drawn plans, which is meant to be mitigation of the development impact upon a rapidly dwindling resource.
Not good enough!
Although I do like the idea of all final reports having a digital copy of the site archive stuck to the back. That would be a great equaliser across the industry, with everyone's primary records being open for easy review and criticism!