28th April 2012, 04:26 PM
A rare luxury, but yes, if a tub of soil turns out to be full of e.g. tiny bones it's nice to find out soon enough to get a bigger sample. I've done jobs where one soil sample has turned an otherwise hum-drum 'there were a couple of undated aditches and a small posthole'-type reports into something vaguely interesting that caught the curator's eye and led to a much-enhanced mitigation strategy, good for the archaeology and sound commercial sense too.
'Desperation' sampling is where you've dug a million tons of the world's biggest early prehistoric monument and floated several truck-loads of soil and you still haven't got enough burnt stuff to send a sample to a C14 lab, and you'd really rather not end up looking like a total XXXX....hope there's enough budget to process the rest of the OSL samples -the very expensive Plan B.....
'Desperation' sampling is where you've dug a million tons of the world's biggest early prehistoric monument and floated several truck-loads of soil and you still haven't got enough burnt stuff to send a sample to a C14 lab, and you'd really rather not end up looking like a total XXXX....hope there's enough budget to process the rest of the OSL samples -the very expensive Plan B.....