9th September 2008, 09:18 PM
Sadly, in my experience newbies have very little risk perception. What's just common sense after ten years will not even occur to the beginner. You really need somebody to explain. (Hands up if you know what super-charging the trench edge means? I wouldn't have when I started.) Looking back I know I've done alot of things in the past out of ignorance which make me blanche now. There still is a "it'll be fine" attitude in archaeology and a nasty tendancy to close ranks when it comes to near misses. We must be favoured by the gods on some level because there really ought to have been more fatalities in archaeology than there has been.