Free archaeology

[Doug]

doug - your hitherto this salient and often i might say amusing posting is entirely at odds with this asertion. it sounds very much like the work of a statastician who works from headline data and who is so very far from the reality on the ground that it is actually funny!

Ahhhh, that's cute.





PS unit, ah got you. I understand now. Cheers

[kevin wooldridge]

Combinations of equipment allowing a 'one-pass' assessment of an area with various data sets being produced would seem to be the way forward. Whether anyone in commercial archaeology is willing to fork out for the combination equipment though is another matter. Geofizz is probably the one area of archaeology that has the fewest cross-overs with other disciplines....there aint much else you can do with the equipment other than archaeology and using it to keep doors open.....

[Unitof1]

seem to be the way forward. W

as I have pointed out to doug, it might be the way forward for you but each archaeologist should have their own method......?

[Dinosaur]

Combinations of equipment allowing a 'one-pass' assessment of an area with various data sets being produced would seem to be the way forward. Whether anyone in commercial archaeology is willing to fork out for the combination equipment though is another matter. Geofizz is probably the one area of archaeology that has the fewest cross-overs with other disciplines....there aint much else you can do with the equipment other than archaeology and using it to keep doors open.....

I believe caesium magnetometers were developed for detecting tanks? [from aircraft, admittedly] GPR seems to turn up a lot on CSI (just before they clean the stiff in 2mins using a pointy shovel...)And I thought GSB used to do stuff for the coal board? Plenty of applications. Am sure GPR in particular has numerous applications, would have headed off many incidents of contractors machining through major services...

From my experience, combinations of different geofizz techniques certainly work well on the right site, but wouldn't be practical in most large-area evals where there's a limited budget, so think we'll have to make do with 100s of ha of magnetometry for now, cheap and cheerful

[Unitof1]

sorry dino but I think that an trench evaluation should be able archaeologicaly to under cut any mag survey

[Unitof1]

sorry dino but I think that any trench evaluation should be easily able archaeologicaly to under cut any mag survey

[Dinosaur]

sorry dino but I think that any trench evaluation should be easily able archaeologicaly to under cut any mag survey

All a trial trench tells you is WHAT'S IN THOSE FEW SQUARE METRES - totally unreliable. Have done a couple of sites where the trial trenches all landed in between the skellies, so nasty surprises for the client when the site was stripped, one had to be bailed out by the ALF.

And then of course there are those 'evaluations' where they've machined straight through the archaeology and said there was nothing there, we've just been picking up the pieces from one where they'd described the metre or so of stratified Roman vicus (including a road, stone buildings etc etc) as 'dark soil layer' and just dug the features cut into the natural at the bottom...errr...we're secretly hoping the client decides to sue someone... }

[Unitof1]

You seem to have a lot of incompetent evaluators in your area, the practice possibly of not doing the excavation from their own evaluation which is a nonsense that ifa/algao cling to to define commercial archaeology and its always worth mentioning that discrete features like graves can be missed by an evaluation

so you would price up an excavation on a mag survey?

[Dinosaur]

Not my job thankfully, I'm of the 'tell me how many people/time I've got and I'll tailor the work to fit' school, the budget's a SEP (presuming you're of the Hitchhiker's generation), but I can think of a lot of people who do since there's rarely much else to go on

[Dinosaur]

You seem to have a lot of incompetent evaluators in your area...

Although that example was perpetrated by a local outfit, there are plenty that were committed by 'outside' units based at the opposite end of the country - maybe they're confused by the lack of chalk hereabouts? }