Sorry to return to the whole technological issue, but whilst laser-scanning and rectified photography are excellent tools and certainly have their place, everyone advocating scanning has missed one rather major point. Interpretation.
If you just scan a 'site' or a building or a road, then all you have is an image (a very useful one, mind). You still need to record the edges of contexts, the stone types and changes in mortar in a wall, and understand the sequence and nature of the site. The machines don't do that for you, and that is the information that currently is often being lost. We have wonderful images, but they have little archaeological meaning until time is spent interpreting them.
I can laser scan a church elevation, for example, but I will need to then add the stone types, the mortar, unpick the complexities that are hidden from immediate view, all of which are done as part of the hand drawing process and are integrated into a traditional approach. Traditional methods are iterative and one aspect feeds into the others, with technology I have too often seen information lost as archaeologists assume the technology has captured it -when it hasn't.
Hand drawing is a part of, and an aid to, understanding and interpretation. As we plan a layer, a cut or a wall we interpret, filter and record the context as a whole as well as the surface of it. Technology can do this, but it doesn't have an archaeologist's brain as part of the machine. The time saving is often an illusion and there are inherent dangers -not just of de-skilling- but of poor understanding. A shiny product, with little depth.
If you just scan a 'site' or a building or a road, then all you have is an image (a very useful one, mind). You still need to record the edges of contexts, the stone types and changes in mortar in a wall, and understand the sequence and nature of the site. The machines don't do that for you, and that is the information that currently is often being lost. We have wonderful images, but they have little archaeological meaning until time is spent interpreting them.
I can laser scan a church elevation, for example, but I will need to then add the stone types, the mortar, unpick the complexities that are hidden from immediate view, all of which are done as part of the hand drawing process and are integrated into a traditional approach. Traditional methods are iterative and one aspect feeds into the others, with technology I have too often seen information lost as archaeologists assume the technology has captured it -when it hasn't.
Hand drawing is a part of, and an aid to, understanding and interpretation. As we plan a layer, a cut or a wall we interpret, filter and record the context as a whole as well as the surface of it. Technology can do this, but it doesn't have an archaeologist's brain as part of the machine. The time saving is often an illusion and there are inherent dangers -not just of de-skilling- but of poor understanding. A shiny product, with little depth.