26th June 2014, 01:32 PM
Marc Berger Wrote:My prediction is that the likes of Jack, like many In commercial archaeology, undertook Prentices two weeks + introduction to digging on a big excavation. Often these big excavations are part of big construction schemes which would have started with an eia/dba (produced for public inquiry purposes) and so it is the natural conclusion of the pawn in the game to be indoctrinated into dbas being the overriding necessity. That the site should have been evaluated completely passes many by.
On the contrary, I have been on several jobs without a thorough DBA and have still managed to save much significant archaeology thus proving the opposite. However, had a decent DBA been done, my, my manager's, the planning officer's and the variety of construction companies jobs would have been much easier.
I just can't understand your persistence that they are all useless. How do you propose a planning officer can decide whether to add an archaeological condition to a planning application, or decide what condition is appropriate without someone assessing the site's potential?
Or are you one of those misguided and ill-informed archaeologists that believe that ever bit of topsoil needs to be sieved for every find and every layer has to be removed by trowel?
Marc Berger Wrote:Even though big excavations are often areas of coincidental concentrations Big excavations also have an effect for the belief that the subsoil is a buried prehistoric landscape rather than the residual remnants of disparate isolated events throughout prehistory. You never really hear adout kilometers of buried medieval landscapes although I suppose pompeii is a roman example. Is Jack saying that he knows of a massive Lahar event in Britain in the prehistoric period?
No but those in the know, know that places like the Vale of Pickering, large tracks of Shetland/Orkney, and even larger tracks of uplands in say Northumberland represent vast areas of preserved prehistoric (and later) landscapes.
It isn't everywhere that the plough has removed meters of archaeology.
Maybe you misunderstood preserved for 'frozen in time'