15th April 2013, 06:19 PM
There's a fair number of things that can be done to improve the 'academic' value of the product even within the imposed constraints (time, budget etc) with minimal effort - as an e.g. I've been involved in any number of evaluations where we've gone back to the curator and suggested moving trenches about, if you've got a good arguement they're usually quite happy with it. Local knowledge and experience counts for a lot, on a recent project prior experience suggested there'd be b***er-all useful stuff to C14 (which proved to be correct) but by pointing this out very early on we got a programme of OSL sampling written in to the spec instead - a bit of advance thinking has basically salvaged the dating programme on a major prehistoric site with very few finds which would otherwise have continued to be pretty much undated
In the same vein, I despair of the way some people waste their limited C14 budgets...
Having a good knowledge of regional/national research agendas and also what other people regard as interesting also helps - the post-med/Victorian pot and clay pipe (and turkey) from my last urban broggle has turned out to have more research value than all the medieval stuff underneath combined, good thing we had enough sense not to machine it all off once we realised there were some nice closed assemblages
In the same vein, I despair of the way some people waste their limited C14 budgets...
Having a good knowledge of regional/national research agendas and also what other people regard as interesting also helps - the post-med/Victorian pot and clay pipe (and turkey) from my last urban broggle has turned out to have more research value than all the medieval stuff underneath combined, good thing we had enough sense not to machine it all off once we realised there were some nice closed assemblages