30th August 2008, 04:36 PM
I think this is a cost/value question. In some areas of the British Isles souterrains are very common and are not even regarded as very exciting unless exceptional by the local archaeologists. In such a region it would not be feasible to do anything but record. Also, many road works require major landscape transformations and I think only a great density of archaeological remains would reroute the road corridor and only then if the cost of excavation/preservation outweighs the additional costs, UNLESS the archaeology was of schedulable importance and even then.....
In some cases I would prefer total excavation of souterrains and other features to other mitigation strategies purely because there hasn't been nearly enough studies on the effects of heavy, fast-moving traffic on underlying deposits because this is such a new problem. Sparky has a point with the backfilled souterrian. Since when was any infrastructure scheme actually joined up? Old archaeological information concerning small features will probably be "lost" when it comes to maintainance work going through tiers of subcontractors. Modern motorways are complex and in many cases deep structures requiring extensive maintainance.
Heading back on topic. To my knowledge souterrains inside road corridors tend to get fully excavated and any bits outside the corridor get left. (Does anyone care to start a thread regarding the wisdom of not being able to extend investigations into areas which although not technichally part of the brief you just know are going to get trashed?) I can think of half a dozen units of the top of my head who have come across souterrains on road schemes in recent years. A quick key word search on google will lead to a lot of brief summaries. Name-dropping a few particular sites to the relevant unit ought to be enough to get the foot in the door, (of course this is easier where there is a publications manager). Some will have been fully published by now, others will only make grey literature. HINT: follow-up Mr Bicket's suggestion and search the SMRs.
Personally, I think it is interesting to see how the ubiquity vs rarity of a feature type determine how much effort is put into understanding it. I suspect that more care is taken excavating souterrains in areas where they are rare and the excavator has not already decided what it is and how it works.
In some cases I would prefer total excavation of souterrains and other features to other mitigation strategies purely because there hasn't been nearly enough studies on the effects of heavy, fast-moving traffic on underlying deposits because this is such a new problem. Sparky has a point with the backfilled souterrian. Since when was any infrastructure scheme actually joined up? Old archaeological information concerning small features will probably be "lost" when it comes to maintainance work going through tiers of subcontractors. Modern motorways are complex and in many cases deep structures requiring extensive maintainance.
Heading back on topic. To my knowledge souterrains inside road corridors tend to get fully excavated and any bits outside the corridor get left. (Does anyone care to start a thread regarding the wisdom of not being able to extend investigations into areas which although not technichally part of the brief you just know are going to get trashed?) I can think of half a dozen units of the top of my head who have come across souterrains on road schemes in recent years. A quick key word search on google will lead to a lot of brief summaries. Name-dropping a few particular sites to the relevant unit ought to be enough to get the foot in the door, (of course this is easier where there is a publications manager). Some will have been fully published by now, others will only make grey literature. HINT: follow-up Mr Bicket's suggestion and search the SMRs.
Personally, I think it is interesting to see how the ubiquity vs rarity of a feature type determine how much effort is put into understanding it. I suspect that more care is taken excavating souterrains in areas where they are rare and the excavator has not already decided what it is and how it works.