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25th February 2006, 01:17 PM
I have just seen a very interesting article in British Archaeology. (BA March/April2006)
Richard Bradley, who has been working with grey literature generated by commercial archaeology, who previously has said that "field archaeology seemed to be out of control", now admits that his initial "pessimism had been misplaced", and that grey literature is a valuable resource.
As a commercial archaeologist who tries to integrate research aims into all bits of fieldwork, no matter how small, this feels like a victory that a segment of academia now recognises that good work [u]is </u>being done in the commercial sector. Shock, horror!
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25th February 2006, 01:36 PM
It does strike me though that he slightly spoils it all when he mentions that he took four years and had to go round and speak to the individuals directly involved with the fieldwork. This doesn't seem like very good preservation by record - what happens when those individuals themselves join the archaeological record?
The position seems to be not quite as bad as thought but still far from ideal.
We owe the dead nothing but the truth.
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25th February 2006, 01:51 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by the invisible man
It does strike me though that he slightly spoils it all when he mentions that he took four years and had to go round and speak to the individuals directly involved with the fieldwork. This doesn't seem like very good preservation by record - what happens when those individuals themselves join the archaeological record?
The ADS have been collecting together 'grey' literature from some of the larger units. Perhaps they should also encourage individuals to donate copies of reports.
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25th February 2006, 04:45 PM
That is the point of the OASIS project which ADS is running and slowly seems to be taking off. All to the good.
Quote:quote:he took four years and had to go round and speak to the individuals directly involved with the fieldwork
Maybe he just didn't trust the reports to have been done rigourously, and he wanted to confirm the techniques with the excavators. He clearly went into the work with prejudiced ideas that have hopefully now been corrected.
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25th February 2006, 06:18 PM
I don't think he meant to criticise the work of commercial archaeologists or archaeology as such, and neither did I, I took his point to be the problem of assimilating and synthesising the vast amount of data produced since PPG16, which if no-one ever reads is essentially pointless. He set out to see if it is accessible, and seems to have concluded that it is.
My concern was that it is one thing for a grant funded leading academic and his colleague to spend four years trawling round the units, ferreting out info and chatting to people, but the average researcher still has no way of knowing what and where the data is, let alone getting access to it. Of course I hope that my fears are groundless, and I recognise that Bradders was intending to produce a major new synthesis of British prehistory, a rare (and welcome) event.
I'm certainly not having a go at anyone and I'm sorry if it appeared that way. It's just the old prob of dissemination and access that I'm asking about.
We owe the dead nothing but the truth.
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25th February 2006, 06:25 PM
Interesting stuff. I do however find it disturbing that it took four years to carry out-particularly when Bournemouth University has (and probably still is?) producing the British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography-a gazetteer of archaeological investigations for some years now.
..knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity..(imam ghazali,ayyuhal-walad)
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25th February 2006, 09:45 PM
Maybe I am being as biased as I'm assuming the academic world is.[:I]
I interpreted the article as an initial critique of commercial techniques that has subsequently been proven erroneous, and not a problem of dissemination which I think both sides of the archaeological world probably agree on.
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25th February 2006, 10:37 PM
My take has been that Richard Badley's problem (from a paper he gave 3? years ago) was of dissemination in England - Whilst there is a very usful index provided by Bournemouth, and a lot of material make its way to the NMR and ADS you still have to physically visit each SMR/ HER (101 I think...) to get a handle on the grey literature.
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27th February 2006, 07:01 PM
Up here it is taking off slowly. It has been made an archiving requirement in WSI's by the local authority. Not all contractors have got round to fulfilling that requirement, which I think the curator should be a lot more strict about.
(I personally have taken to putting some of my work on in my own time, because my boss doesn't ever quite find time for it to be done.)
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28th February 2006, 11:04 AM
We have it as a reporting requirement, so that we won't approve a report unless there's one in the back or the form is emailed to us separately, just like we used to do with the old paper SMR forms.
However, some units do prefer to do them on mass at the archiving phase - I think the big ones may make an exception for us and fill them in earlier, but we haven't had any real problems. Touch wood.
ML
