28th November 2014, 01:58 PM
Marc Berger Wrote:Jack I have tried writing a so called heritage statement, they are pretty much meaningless. Give me a field evaluation and I will give you a guesstimate of excavation costs, that's it. There is no such thing as heritage in that evaluation its purely archaeology. Hers have very little do with archaeology other than to tell you if the areas been excavated before and if it has it's still probably cheaper for the client to do an evaluation than visit the her, that they might have a copy of the report is a bonuse but you could say that what's in them is purely academic. As you have pointed out elsewhere even though the evaluation said it was iron age it can still turn out to be anglosaxon? Was it the end of the world?
What happens if you find nothing in your evaluation trenches even though there's obviously going to be archaeology in the site (we've all been there!)? Without the heritage statement [is that what they're called these days? - not done a DBA for a while] you'd be stuffed, with the heritage statement (black-and-white statement that there's likely to be stuff there even though the eval trenches missed it) you can at least potentially justify a watching brief when the site gets stripped
HERs - so if you are, eg. digging half a Roman building, you don't bother using the HER record of the other half dug back in, say, the 1970s? No wonder archaeology in this country struggles to move forward! There are situations where you could be really impressing your clients by e.g. saving them money getting C14 dating for a ditch on the grounds that XX Unit got 15 dates from the same feature the other side of the hedge 5 years ago...but of course if you can't be a***ed to do the research you'll never know
