1st March 2014, 01:47 PM
Scary, seem to be agreeing with far too much of what PP's saying on here!
Mike T. - we do actually give people some training when they've never written a report before - the results would be a disaster otherwise! Usually takes the form of mentoring and getting them to read a few similar reports before they start, and they get (constructively) edited to h*ll the first few times (having been warned in advance), plus the management are quite happy to chuck stuff back if it's c**p since poor product reflects badly on the reputation of their company - although it seems a fair number of units couldn't give a **** in that department.
PP is right about understanding the archaeology on site in order to create a report worth a s**t. I've usually got a broad idea what I'll be aiming for in the final report before a trench is even marked out, but that comes from experience so probably unfair to expect that of the 'beginner' PO. There are always going to be 'bullet points' (things in the project design/WSI ticked off to keep the Consultant and Curator happy - helps if you know your curator's quirks!...have been learning quite a lot about post-medieval garden design recently, for instance:face-crying
and things that are going to be getting more coverage than others in the publication. One small pit can be the star of the show, and that needs realising at the time, on site, and dealing with appropriately at the time, no good in PX realising that maybe you should have sampled 100% of the fill rather than just the routine 40L or whatever. Some scientific sampling techniques (OSL and the like) often require booking the specialists in advance, so if the bit of landscape's only going to be available for a week or three you've got to be planning it before you even start. As an e.g., I've got a job coming up on a Neolithic site where we may or may not have stuff suitable for OSL profiling/dating, but that'll only work if I leave them some big, wide, strategically located baulks to extract samples sequences from, so that affects how I approach the job from the outset.
Excavation reports can also be used for driving research agendas, given the right level of forethought, on several occasions I've got specialists to include quotable comments which I've known will come in handy in the future, and all sorts of helpful things can be innocuously put in publications to be wheeled out further down the line - "Joe Bloggs has suggested that...{ref}, and therefore it is recommended that etc..." - but that's probably food for a different thread?
Mike T. - we do actually give people some training when they've never written a report before - the results would be a disaster otherwise! Usually takes the form of mentoring and getting them to read a few similar reports before they start, and they get (constructively) edited to h*ll the first few times (having been warned in advance), plus the management are quite happy to chuck stuff back if it's c**p since poor product reflects badly on the reputation of their company - although it seems a fair number of units couldn't give a **** in that department.
PP is right about understanding the archaeology on site in order to create a report worth a s**t. I've usually got a broad idea what I'll be aiming for in the final report before a trench is even marked out, but that comes from experience so probably unfair to expect that of the 'beginner' PO. There are always going to be 'bullet points' (things in the project design/WSI ticked off to keep the Consultant and Curator happy - helps if you know your curator's quirks!...have been learning quite a lot about post-medieval garden design recently, for instance:face-crying
and things that are going to be getting more coverage than others in the publication. One small pit can be the star of the show, and that needs realising at the time, on site, and dealing with appropriately at the time, no good in PX realising that maybe you should have sampled 100% of the fill rather than just the routine 40L or whatever. Some scientific sampling techniques (OSL and the like) often require booking the specialists in advance, so if the bit of landscape's only going to be available for a week or three you've got to be planning it before you even start. As an e.g., I've got a job coming up on a Neolithic site where we may or may not have stuff suitable for OSL profiling/dating, but that'll only work if I leave them some big, wide, strategically located baulks to extract samples sequences from, so that affects how I approach the job from the outset.Excavation reports can also be used for driving research agendas, given the right level of forethought, on several occasions I've got specialists to include quotable comments which I've known will come in handy in the future, and all sorts of helpful things can be innocuously put in publications to be wheeled out further down the line - "Joe Bloggs has suggested that...{ref}, and therefore it is recommended that etc..." - but that's probably food for a different thread?