A handbook for new diggers?

[Dinosaur]

I've been a field archaeologist for 32 years and a surveyor for most of that time and I have never seen a plane table in action, perhaps I have been working in all the wrong places!!

Yup, oop North for a start, check out Archaeology County Durham 7 (2012) p.37, although it's not obvious why someone's set the thing up since there seems to be various bits of electronic push-button stuff on other tripods nearby....

[Jack]

Why? At the end of the day someone's going to have to draw round all the rocks, why not do it on site where you can actually see what's going on? A good draughtsman (I assume there are some still kicking about) is always going to do a far better and more 'interpretive' drawing using the 'live' subject?

Nah....its debatable. Depends on time, weather conditions and definitely the skills of those doing the drawing...........but in my opinion, given the practicalities of time, weather, available staff and parallax, rectified photography will ALWAYS be more accurate (if done correctly). Its just you can't check a hand drawn plan of cobbles as accurately as a rectified/digitised plan.

But I do agree that rectification/digitising is not always the answer and can have hidden pitfalls.

[tmsarch]

http://www.canterburytrust.co.uk/catpres..._AREA2.jpg

This "image" seems to have white lines drawn in it. How did they get there and what are they supposed to represent? By what method was the site excavated?

Wall following?

Sorry - I don't know the answers I'm afraid - it's not a project I've had any personal involvement in, but simply one I came across on-line.

Others on the group may have more detailed information, but I suspect that the white lines on the plan derrive from EDM/GPS gathered point data.

My reason for raising it was simply to show an example of a practical application of a technology that until recently wouldn't have been viable on a commercial site. I'm not promoting this as a wholesale replacement for hand drawn plans. As others have mentioned there is a danger that over reliance on technology could lead to people not looking at or interpreting the archaeology in the field. That being said technology is also a useful weapon to have as part of an arsenal of techniques.

In this case I feel that the 3D oblique image of a complex sequence of brick walls in an engaging image and adds value to the project. It may also have provided a level of detail that may not have been otherwise affordable or achievable in the time frames of the project.

I think it also has a value beyond a pure record, to me it is likely to be much easier to understand and comprehend by non-archaeologists. To the general public a 3D model that can be manipulated might be easier to visualise and engage with than traditional technical paper plans and sections. If it can provide a record of an acceptable standard, in a cost effective manner, whilst adding additional value I think we'd be pretty stupid to ignore new technologies for the sake of tradition - the 'we've always done it that way' mentality.

I feel for some sites such imaging may prove to be a much more 'powerful' record- it goes beyond simply recording what brick went where. Whilst we need to ensure an acurate record we also need to think why we're doing archaeology - if technology helps to explain archaeology to the public we should seek ways to use it more effectively.

[Unitof1]

?Finally...if you know you will hand-plan, and the team are good at it, overall it can work out faster than laying-out and post-exrectifying photographs : the post-ex work can after all be done by anyone whocan use illustrator rather than having to wait for the skilled surveyor/illustrator using a more complex and slower process.?

I think that you and Canterbury et al are drawn into the same ?.fault -for want of a lesser accusation. As far as I am concerned taking a single context model for excavation, the method generates pre and post excavation plans as part of the method. In as much as 2d plans can attempt to contain 3d contexts we end up after excavation with a set of drawings that can be combined to recreated the special distribution of these contexts. This is what field archaeologists created. Possibly there might be a use to digitally capture the pre and post ex of a context but the record that should be produced is about excavated space

[SIZE=3]What we are presented in the Canterbury image is either a pre-ex or a post ex. It holds no context information what so ever that could more easily be contained and recorded for posterity in the [/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]statement ?a pile of bricks? attached to some location. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=3]Unfortunately pre and post ex pictures are what are most often presented to the public as the product of what field archaeology produces and so we end up with attitudes such as[/SIZE]

[SIZE=3][SIZE=3][SIZE=3]such imaging may prove to be a much more 'powerful' record-it goes beyond simply recording what brick went where. Whilst we need to ensure an acurate record we also need to think why we're [/SIZE][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][SIZE=3]doing
[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]archaeology - if technology helps to explain archaeology to the public we should [/SIZE][SIZE=3]seek ways to use it more effectively.[/SIZE][/SIZE]

[/SIZE]

Sod off public and volitters

[Dinosaur]

Nah....its debatable. Depends on time, weather conditions and definitely the skills of those doing the drawing...........but in my opinion, given the practicalities of time, weather, available staff and parallax, rectified photography will ALWAYS be more accurate (if done correctly). Its just you can't check a hand drawn plan of cobbles as accurately as a rectified/digitised plan.

But I do agree that rectification/digitising is not always the answer and can have hidden pitfalls.

By all accounts the current project with the Roman road that needs recording that you mentioned a few posts back was under flowing water/mud yesterday - not a problem for hand-planning (have had to plan by feel plenty of times in the past, planning that sort of thing's one of those 'save it for a wet day' jobs) but I suspect your photographic approach would be a bit of a non-starter under those conditions? And suspect a photogrammetric rig might be a good start? Last bit of site 'plan by photographs' I was involved in all the survey markers kept blowing away mid-shoot, so took an hour to photo something that would have taken about 5 minutes to draw conventionally... }

[Seedy Girl]

Have been waiting ages for a sampling/ environmental question to come up and the time it does I am out digging those cobbles that Dino and Jack are talking about. Everyone has pretty much covered the sampling issue 'cept for one, teeny, tiny thing! Just because you don't see it when you're digging, doesn't mean it's not there (charcoal, planty stuff, cod otoliths etc. ). Oh and remember its better to over sample than under sample, because you can always get rid during the PX.
One of my favourite reasons for taking a sample that was noted on a sample sheet came from Dino...'desperation'.....}

[Wax]

Just because you don't see it when you're digging doesn't means it's not there

Hurrah best reason for having a sampling strategy simply put:face-kiss:

[Unitof1]

Just because you don't see it when you're digging doesn't means it's not there

would you advocate that samples should be processed on site before the context is fully excavated?

[Dinosaur]

A rare luxury, but yes, if a tub of soil turns out to be full of e.g. tiny bones it's nice to find out soon enough to get a bigger sample. I've done jobs where one soil sample has turned an otherwise hum-drum 'there were a couple of undated aditches and a small posthole'-type reports into something vaguely interesting that caught the curator's eye and led to a much-enhanced mitigation strategy, good for the archaeology and sound commercial sense too.

'Desperation' sampling is where you've dug a million tons of the world's biggest early prehistoric monument and floated several truck-loads of soil and you still haven't got enough burnt stuff to send a sample to a C14 lab, and you'd really rather not end up looking like a total XXXX....hope there's enough budget to process the rest of the OSL samples -the very expensive Plan B.....

[Unitof1]

maybe so rare in fact that taking a "sample" is not an aid to excavation and has little to do with identifying the context which is what the digger (field archaeologist) do-mostly by seeing, with a bit of touch and occational sniff and taste. Basically the sample is an artifact like any other find found in the context, and its the context that the digger does see.

and which is why mosts samples retrived from ditches only reinforce the bleeding obvious - that they had been a ditch fill. I had a brief the other day which said that I was to sample all peat deposits I encountered. I hope that a peat sample will come back as its not peat but something else and I will get to say chuck it because I was told to sample peat deposits. but then these brief writers like to let you know whoe is in charge