Free archaeology

[P Prentice]

yes- digging should be the final solution and always done.

so what is the point of pm (other than to refine its own models)?

[P Prentice]

........Anyways it is why I, and most PMers, don't recommend PM to replace anything. It is best used by consultants in the early planning stages of a project e.g. build your road here if you want to avoid it.

two contradictory statements methinks!

[P Prentice]

unit dear, geophysics can be an excellent tool when evaluating a site and can even reveal aspects of past land use that you will never find in an evaluation trench. the most useless aspect of an evaluation is a dba

[Unitof1]

can even reveal aspects of past land use that you will never find in an evaluation trench

like what, tree throws, ard marks, forestry, ploughing, metal working, mining? It cant "find" anything. It just produces the "possible" archaeology of resistivity, magnetometry refraction, reflection....diggers are the only archaeology producing machine.

[Jack]

Not insulting in the least bit. PM even after 40 years still has much to be improved upon. Though I have not personally worked on it for 40 years.

Yes- what is important differs from place to place- in southwest US it is 10 lithics within 100m or 3 anything that is datable and all over 50 years of age (not still in use). Here it is what the council arc or EH/HS/Cadw/ etc. says is important with some guidelines.

If you are interested in more I would recommend this publication- https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/11863 stroll to the bottom to get the full pdf


Chapter one will give you a good overview and the other chapters cover a lot of your questions.

I would recommend reading the beginning of chapter 7. It illustrates my point made ages ago in this thread- even with predictive modelling being very good you always, always test. The other chapters are fairly good at explaining the different ways PM works in detail.


For interesting work on heritage management and PM-
http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/i...inger.html


For the most recent work on the subject this is a good read

http://www.academia.edu/433078/P._Verhag...and_Theory

Overall predictive modelling is basically a deskbased assessment. The only difference is that instead of going to the HR and seeing if anything has been found before in an area and then making a judgement call you follow a set methodology. Not saying what people do with deskdased assessment is flawed just that with PM there are ways to account for problems with the HR that people may not employ on their own deskbased assessment.

Can't iterate this enough- PM can be very very good but it is never 100%. As the Dutch have learned (see that chapter 7) it can not replace actual investigations. It can however sever as a good consulting tool for those in the business of consulting clients about what sort of archaeology to expect. Well, what sort of archaeology they will be required to deal with. As Kevin and Jack point out archaeology is everywhere but not everyone agrees on what it is or what is important.

Jack- some of those resources are some pretty heavy jargon laced reading that I even have trouble getting through at times. Also, it doesn't capture all of the possible ways of doing things. Your question about testing models actually has about 4-5 different ways of doing it. Actually- two main ways but lots of sub-catagories. One is you go out and test your models (can be expensive) e.g. I say you will find site type X here but not there so lets excavate here AND there using a sampling strategy that can then be applied to eerything (people often make the mistake of only looking where they predict things to be- you can see the flaw in that. Very relevant to the geophys talk as well.) or two you look at past data- which involves all sorts of extra steps to eliminate response bias (which are not perfect). If you want I can point you in the direction of good examples. I am afraid that in only a couple of hundred words I am leaving out all the nuances and problems people have found with PM (and that PP finds entertaining) so it is probably not the best explanation of how PM works.

Hope those readings help. If you have anymore questions please fire away.

Cheers.........will endeavor to read the links.

[Jack]

Wow I go away to site for....less than a day.... and this discussion explodes!

Silly, silly, silly Unit. When will you learn. The world does not consist of just what you see in your narrow view? There are bigger worlds, There are more things in heaven and earth, (Horatio),
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

On large projects, especially in the pre-planning stage, good archaeological companies/consultants produce DBA's and/or contribute to the project environment statement (ES) including HER/NMR searches, aerial photography searches (or google earth - hooray), Lidar inspection, site walkover, fieldwalking, geophysical survey and trial-trenching to test the previous info. From these and varying forms of predictive modelling, recommendations are made, which are often followed and/or adapted. These recommendations can include site avoidance, the best form of mitigation.

I have been involved in several projects where the client avoided important archaeology either by route change, construction methodology change or even abandoning building in that area entirely. Surely this is the best result, so that the remains can be excavated at a later stage under a research dig rather than rescue dig?

But given your 'screw over the client' policy, I'm not surprised you don't get the kind of clients we do. }

[Dinosaur]

when the client wants you to find nothing so that the other half of your time you look for nothing which is why you will use negative results from pm as an excuse not to evaluate by trench most of the area and you and the so called curators can pretend that geophysics has done the archaeology.

If the client wanted to find nothing he'd probably go looking for a different archaeological contractor! And I think you missed my earlier post where I pointed out that we normally bung some trenches on blank bits of geofizz surveys to check that they're really blank? [although to be fair to the pro-geophysics lobby they do, indeed, often come up blank]

[Dinosaur]

On large projects, especially in the pre-planning stage, good archaeological companies/consultants produce DBA's and/or contribute to the project environment statement (ES) including HER/NMR searches, aerial photography searches (or google earth - hooray), Lidar inspection, site walkover, fieldwalking, geophysical survey and trial-trenching to test the previous info. From these and varying forms of predictive modelling, recommendations are made, which are often followed and/or adapted. These recommendations can include site avoidance, the best form of mitigation.

Think you missed a few, GI monitoring and topo spring to mind straight off, am sure there are more, and I hope your DBAs use a bit more than just HER/NMR!

[P Prentice]

like what, tree throws, ard marks, forestry, ploughing, metal working, mining? It cant "find" anything. It just produces the "possible" archaeology of resistivity, magnetometry refraction, reflection....diggers are the only archaeology producing machine.

like evidence for human activity that has been subsumed into plough soil. whilst you might find some pot or a bone this only becomes relevant when an archaeologist studies and interprets it leaving a record of the work for other archaeologists to review, add to, disagree with, contradict etc (eg archaeology)

[P Prentice]

I have been involved in several projects where the client avoided important archaeology either by route change, construction methodology change or even abandoning building in that area entirely. Surely this is the best result, so that the remains can be excavated at a later stage under a research dig rather than rescue dig?

nope - dont why you even think that. surely it is best for an archaeologist to be employed to dig it? surely it is best that it is rescued from the plough, looters, unit, shifty consultants, bad builders etc asap