The next question: recording

[P Prentice]

.......I agree totally with the 'record what you see' part. That is an imperative. But, when presented with a feature that displays all the physical characteristics of what the average person understands to be a ditch, I don't see a problem with calling it a ditch. Because the word doesn't, or at least shouldn't, do anything other than describe the feature's characteristics. It isn't a value-word, in that it doesn't imply any kind of function or intent. Now you may be lucky enough that there is sufficient evidence relating to this ditch to say that it's 'possibly' this, or 'probably' that, but calling it a ditch in itself doesn't imply that it was dug to please the gods, because the digger had just split up from his girlfriend/manager/goat and needed to expend some energy, or that they needed to stop the privy flooding when it rained. Further, I worry that using such couched words as 'linear feature' or whatever may even cloud the issue to a future reader, where conventions may have changed. I'm very much in favour of keeping the language as simple and basic as possible to avoid any future ambiguity

i'm guessing you are working on a large open area excavation where you are allocated 'features' to dig and you divide the fills into 'contexts' and put your finds in bags labelled with individual numbers and you fill out your context sheet after determining which boxes are relevant and which ones sont seem to be. you may even be given an 'intersection' where multiple features appear to meet and it is quite exciting trying to work out which ones came first and which ones came later. you may even have had a conversation with the supervisor who has jumped in your hole, made some loose and scratched a few lines in slightly different places to where you had them based on the angle the pebbles lay or a slight discolouration etc. you will probably draw the sections based on those lines and if you are lucky it will all make complete sense. maybe, just maybe the work you have done will be used to explain how the site developed with this feature cutting that and the other cutting this. but did you understand where those 'fills' came from and how they got there? did you understand what the effect of each of those processes was on the surrounding 'contexts'? does it matter? do you think that the story would be the same 100mm or 1000mm away or will this do?
one day you might find yourself 3m down a 10m wide shaft where the top 2.9m was excavated by 10 other people. you are surrounded by labels and scratches and blocks of concrete and steel. you know you are in 2000 years of persisitent process but none of it looks like a ditch.