21st September 2013, 05:51 PM
Just to stir the pot, the biggest blot on the copybook of Preservation in Situ has been an almost wilfully negligent approach that sees urban sites "preserved" by deep piling that allegedly touches only a fraction but effectively buggers the rest, or sites where only the building footprint requires mitigation despite what we all know about the "collateral damage" caused by heavy plant moving around a soft-soil site, and many other such scenarios where the "in Situ" solution is just a whitewash to limit the pain for the developers in case they cry "foul" and trigger a review of Planning conditions. If it is correctly applied it can indeed preserve the archaeology until there is a true need to damage it, but I'd argue there are lots of sites where if we were honest we'd insist on a bigger excavation footprint because we know the "preserved" strat around the edges will get FUBAR'd anyway.
Of course, it would be very expensive to dig everything, and frankly the whole whinge about PiS is usually directed at digging perfectly "safe" (but juicy) Scheduled Monuments rather than at mopping up those sites that are getting developed to extinction. Who among us hasn't worked a site where some earlier well-meaning yahoo has already dug wall-chasing trenches that effectively obliterated any useful stratigraphic articulation between the important bits? If we charge ahead with digging anything we like, are we not doing the same disservice to future generations? It strikes me that ANY not-rescue excavation needs to be justified up the ying-yang before it can be even considered, since the castles and abbeys scattered round our countryside aren't often under any real threat. But where DC is involved, I'm all for bigger, better, full-on excavations instead of poxy little keyholes and "destruction in situ" as is practiced all too often...
And I defy anyone to demonstrate that any excavation carried out in the history of our profession/hobby has been total in its examination and recording of the features it removed. Even with the best will, we machine off "overburden" (eg. stuff later than what we're interested in, be it "modern" or just that pesky "medieval" crap masking the Roman stuff), we take less than 100% soil samples, and we decide on site what we will record. Our archives are thus a biased product, showing what we are interested in, and omitting things that don't catch our fancy at the time. Of course, other archaeologists may be interested in the stuff we ignored, but they are SOL.
As the First Law of Thermodynamics points out, "you can't win"...
Of course, it would be very expensive to dig everything, and frankly the whole whinge about PiS is usually directed at digging perfectly "safe" (but juicy) Scheduled Monuments rather than at mopping up those sites that are getting developed to extinction. Who among us hasn't worked a site where some earlier well-meaning yahoo has already dug wall-chasing trenches that effectively obliterated any useful stratigraphic articulation between the important bits? If we charge ahead with digging anything we like, are we not doing the same disservice to future generations? It strikes me that ANY not-rescue excavation needs to be justified up the ying-yang before it can be even considered, since the castles and abbeys scattered round our countryside aren't often under any real threat. But where DC is involved, I'm all for bigger, better, full-on excavations instead of poxy little keyholes and "destruction in situ" as is practiced all too often...
And I defy anyone to demonstrate that any excavation carried out in the history of our profession/hobby has been total in its examination and recording of the features it removed. Even with the best will, we machine off "overburden" (eg. stuff later than what we're interested in, be it "modern" or just that pesky "medieval" crap masking the Roman stuff), we take less than 100% soil samples, and we decide on site what we will record. Our archives are thus a biased product, showing what we are interested in, and omitting things that don't catch our fancy at the time. Of course, other archaeologists may be interested in the stuff we ignored, but they are SOL.
As the First Law of Thermodynamics points out, "you can't win"...