Wow, pop out to spend a merry day shovelling out yet more Victorian garden soil (0.6m and still not all out, been at it all week, good spoil heap though!) and pages more sense (mostly) to brighten my evening!
I've had occasion to 'ghost write' a fair number of sites of all sizes, usually due to the perennial problem of people moving on during the interminable PX process, from small watching briefs up to publishing largish urban sites, and it is
not for the inexperienced - many years supervisorial site experience is required to be able to untangle the often tortuous site record and 'see through' some of the more obscure descriptions that people manage to write on context sheets, tease-out the stratigraphic impossibilities, spot where specialists have completely misunderstood the context of the material they've been playing with etc etc. There is
absolutely no way a junior staff-member back in the office who has no direct experience of the site can possibly be capable of doing this to a competent standard, and I'm absolutely
appalled that some units think they can get away with such shoddy practice - although it could explain some of the c**p site reports I've been seeing recently...
- oh, and as Jack knows, I quite often don't even put my name on as an author unless I've done
a lot to an unfinished text (50%+), often go for 'edited for publication by' somewhere in the acknowledgements - I've been the victim a few times of my work (reports, photos etc) appearing attributed to others, and its b***dy annoying
!
After a decade or two of working the circuit one of the reasons I've nailed my colours to my current employer's mast is that we're encouraged as far as possible to get the maximum out of any project and take it wherever the archaeology's going, within budgetery limits of course, but the management's usually up for making a case to the client for more money if its something good (ok, ok, so not always successfully), and means we've also got a good reputation with all the local curators. Part of this includes high levels of internal peer-review - the POs, SPOs and managers are all encouraged to discuss and input into any projects, not just their own, and while 'unusual' ideas get floated regularly, if they're b***ocks they soon get shot down. If we're going to say that nothing turned up on a WB we're expected to be able to demonstrate this to anyone who wants definitive negative evidence, and also come up with, as far as possible, a reason why we thought nothing was there (possibly my best was a job where the local curator demanded a watching brief on a cable trench along the bottom of a 30' deep modern road cutting and then across a former landfill....kid you not! Enjoyed writing that one up!!!!). Isn't all this roughly how all units should operate? - would be good for the archaeology anyway :face-thinks:
DBAs - over the last few years it's quite likely that I've actually made more significant discoveries while preparing DBAs/PDs than I have on site - amazing what you can tease out of borehole data! On my current job we're annoyingly not going deep enough to have a decent look at the previously unsuspected upstanding rampart bank that I discovered from an evening in with a bottle of wine and the borehole data - no idea of date but its got a Norman castle wall terraced into the front of it, and a small sondage in the base of a trial trench confirmed that it ain't natural
Easier than digging holes but you ain't gonna find stuff like that by just regurgetating HER data parrot-like :0
