28th December 2012, 01:35 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:To give a fairly recent example from my own back-log, no one on-site realised at the time the significance of a couple of cow vertebrae in an undated shallow pit - till the bone specialist pointed out they were actually from an auroch...
If it had been left to us/me, the size of the bones would have suggested a post-med cow and the site would merely have got a couple of sentences in the up-coming publication, along the lines of 'no significant archaeology found in these trenches', rather than spawning a dozen C14 dates and plans for a major up-coming excavation. I think maybe that specialist report was probably cost-effective in the long run? :face-thinks:
Exactly! This happens all the time, and could give loads of examples. My personal recent favourite was a dig near a motte and bailey on the edge of a Roman town. The site supervisor fancied himself as a pot expert, and there he was on the cover of the local paper clutching a complete 'Saxo-Norman' pot and announcing to the world he'd found the (previously unlocated) bailey ditch. I got to look at the same pot a few weeks later (the finds manager smelled a rat) - it was Roman, and so was everything else in the feature. It was a Roman land boundary.
\"Whoever understands the pottery, understands the site\" - Wheeler