27th August 2013, 04:36 PM
archaeologyexile Wrote:good point...however, given that HER's are in general maintained by council's their primary aim is to inform planning decisions, can we really continue to say that despite the presence of no evidence we should keep doing groundbreaking evaluations?
Yes! There's no real pattern to the location of archaeological remains. You can equally do an evaluation on an area that the local HER records would suggest could come up trumps and find nothing, and you can do an evaluation on an area that looks like will be blank, to find it's full of roundhouses and timber halls.
There's no great way to pre-planning archaeology. Geophysics isn't always suitable/doesn't work, invasive evaluation can depend on where you put the trenches. I've been on evals where if the trench had been 1m to the east, we would have missed the archaeology.
But, we have to work with what we've got, and arguably a negative evaluation result is as important as a positive one.