| Entry: | The following post is not meant to discourage anyone from continuing what they are doing or to be proud of their role within this amazing project, it is merely a collection of thoughts and debates that have been percolating in my brain since I began my work this season.
An unfortunate, and largely unavoidable, aspect of such a large project as this is that somewhere along the line errors occur, including but not limited to mislabelling of bags, data entry typos as a result of tired and overused eyes and fingers, and even the downright ingnoring or accidental overlooking of already implemented or new and innovative finds management systems. That was a long sentence, but my point is that over the last 20 years a number of specialists have attempted to adopt and improve systems that have been tried and tested, and every time a new person takes over there will inevietably be some overlap, but also some important aspects, both large and miniscule, that are forgotten or overlooked.
My job this season has been to completely overhaul the chipped stone inventory, to ensure that everything exists physically and virtually in the same crates. To say the least, this has been a very tedious and often frustrating experience. That's not to say that I'm not enjoying it or feeling fulfilled by it, because it is a very important task that will allow future researchers to perform their analyses to completion with more efficiency. The overall goal is that these specialists will not need to waste valuable time and resources searching fruitlessly for material that either does not exist in the databases or exists multiple times within various crates. Although this task of mine (and Andja's for over a week now), seems to be underappreciated in the grand scheme of things, we are still undergraduates after all and do feel like we are completing an important job for the project.
That said, it has been very frustrating and mind opening to realize the problems that can arise from the post-processual approach to archaeological excavation. Of course we have encountered many problems related to data entry (or non-entry) from all over the site, but the Bach material for example has been particularly problematic. Last week I spent almost 2 days pouring over a crate that contained most of the heavy residue collected during the 7 years (?) of Bach excavation. It turned out that there were 2036 bags of flotation I inventoried, and when I say inventoried I mean that only around 1% of it was in either the chipped stone or finds database, the rest was in neither. The reason why is a mystery to me, but needless to say I had to enter the other 99% manually, which took a very long time indeed, especially considering how errors I encountered and had to fix (which included but were not limited to unit and bag number typos on the bag tags, data entry typos, double entries and the same bag numbers existing for two separate units from different areas of the site, among various others that I won't bore you with). The majority of these bags contained less than 5 tiny obsidian chips that together weighed less than 0.05 grams. Also, the majority of these are still not in the chipped stone database, because my priority was to inventory them into the finds database and did not have the time to weigh, quantify and describe every bag and enter them into chipped stone. That will have to be a job for another day (or year).
First, I acknowledge the importance of collecting flotation samples and analysing the contents of units at the almost microscopic level. However, the questions I pose after such an endeavour are these. At what point do we cross the fine line from meaningful collection and analyses of this material, and into an area where it is collected just for the sake of being thorough and responsible. How many hours have been spent collecting, identifying, labelling and distributing this material? Will anyone ever look meaningfully at this material, or will it just disappear into a crate, then into a depot, never to be considered or acknowledged again? Then again, now that we have delved this deeply into the collection and management of virtually all archaeological material contained within all units, how can we possibly go back to an approach where most of this stuff gets ignored? Would that be ethically or academically irresponsible of us, or would that be a practical response to this issue that would allow us to focus on the "more pertinent" (running the risk of sounding like an aged culture historian here) questions of archaeological research?
This might have been a fairly long and depressing blog post, and I do apologize as it was my first one of the year, but I feel that these are some important questions to ponder. I promise my next post will be more uplifting and "glass half full", and it will probably be soon because the full inventory completion is so close I can taste it (my prediction is it will be done before lunch today!!) |
