28th June 2014, 12:52 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:How can anyone experience all of the potential scenarios where skills might be applied in 2 weeks at the same time as learning the skills.....
Of course they can't. Every archaeologist is learning every day of their working lives, as every site and every feature is different and needs to be treated as a new and unique challenge. You cannot teach someone in two weeks how to deal with all of these challenges but you can teach them to consider that each feature is a new and unique challenge.
In two weeks you can teach someone how to use a trowel, shovel, mattock and wheelbarrow and you can teach them what the natural looks like and what soil needs to be excavated and what soil needs to be left in place. You can't leave them to determine where the most optimal place to locate a section to investigate the relationship between a sequence of intercutting features, this takes experience and this is what supervisors are for.
You can teach them to identify finds, what a worked flint looks like, what iron pan looks like etc. You can teach them how to draw a section or plan, how to fill in a context sheet. You can teach them about stratigraphy and how to construct a Harris matrix. They may make a few mistakes or be slower than someone with more experience but I don't buy into this 'mystique' around being an archaeologist. The basics are simple and easily taught. The rest comes with good supervision and experience.