distinctive regional traditions

[Marc Berger]

Problem was when some folks put pipelines across this landscape it turned out that the pits weren't focused on the hill.

Presume that all these wondrous coincidents of archaeology and development do not have their own symbiosis thingy going on. I had the misfortune to be setup on a pipeline once and after a little while it became apparant that the pipeline was going from minor hill top to minor hill top to the extent that I considered setting up an organisation called save our hill tops. What was going on was that the machines that lifted and put the pipes into the trench were unsymmetrical and the weight of the pipes that they were trying to lift a bit dodgy so that the whole pipe lifting operation was best done facing either up or down the slope. This trait had the effect that even after a wondrous environmental impact assessment had clearly been used to align the the pipe away from all known and imaginary archie-ology the sneaky pipeliners still got their way of going directly up and down slopes and what was amazing was that they where hitting these very hill tops to within centimetres. The next coincidental thing that happened its that these hill tops almost invariably had boundaries or other liners near them to the extent that the easement shot up from 30 metres to 65 metres. It still makes me wince when I consider the carnage that went on around these features but mostly I imagine that give it a thousand years and we will find that where there was once a hill top there will be a valley caused by erosion instigated by the trench. Any way the only conclusion that I drew was that archaeology could be found anywhere but that it was more likely to be eroded on hills -the old absence of evidence motto and you need to do an evaluation to find it and not a watching brief of five bulldozers either side of a break in slope or of a summit...

But...what I wanted to ask Jack is why are you trying to find any patterns in your data or why archaeology could be premised on a contour or dino where doesn't somewhere overlook water? Is it cause you is trying to undercut the amount of evaluation trenches that should be undertaken?