11th April 2014, 11:28 PM
(This post was last modified: 12th April 2014, 12:02 AM by Marc Berger.)
"Everything in a context is older than the context" that I think is pure genius.
I have never heard that said but it is a fact. The digger identifies an Arrivals hall and its calls it a context. Everything in a context is a collapsed ceiling question. Crocodile I think that you have found the paradigm of the context. I think that it is a better axiom than anything that Harris tried to copy from the geologists. I have worried a lot recently that Harris's principles are at best truisms. He never seemed to have generated much of a maths from his principles. Wooldridge talked about Valetta and the elephant in the room, isn't single context planning. It only ever made much sense when using a five metre grid on molas perma-trace when post ex was all about unblocking rotary ink pens. Seems to me as people start using 3d plots of mattock contexts that we will forget single context planning and we will move towards spit digging. Single context digging gave a lot of archaeological power to the digger. If there were fifty pots from a context it does not matter if they were found at the top or the bottom of the context. If big brother was to start plotting where the pots were found within the context who knows where it would lead. I once worked on an eh site where we were told that we would not get any spot dates unless the context had 10 or more pot sherds in it as the pot specialists were too busy with the back log to get spot dates out. The very next day I found my first 10 sherd context (I had to break one in half but I made it and got them all into one bag).
I have never heard that said but it is a fact. The digger identifies an Arrivals hall and its calls it a context. Everything in a context is a collapsed ceiling question. Crocodile I think that you have found the paradigm of the context. I think that it is a better axiom than anything that Harris tried to copy from the geologists. I have worried a lot recently that Harris's principles are at best truisms. He never seemed to have generated much of a maths from his principles. Wooldridge talked about Valetta and the elephant in the room, isn't single context planning. It only ever made much sense when using a five metre grid on molas perma-trace when post ex was all about unblocking rotary ink pens. Seems to me as people start using 3d plots of mattock contexts that we will forget single context planning and we will move towards spit digging. Single context digging gave a lot of archaeological power to the digger. If there were fifty pots from a context it does not matter if they were found at the top or the bottom of the context. If big brother was to start plotting where the pots were found within the context who knows where it would lead. I once worked on an eh site where we were told that we would not get any spot dates unless the context had 10 or more pot sherds in it as the pot specialists were too busy with the back log to get spot dates out. The very next day I found my first 10 sherd context (I had to break one in half but I made it and got them all into one bag).
.....nature was dead and the past does not exist