| Entry: | Arrived on site and a large chunk of F.479 had fallen off during the night along the crack line which has been getting steadily wider for the last week. Thankfully we had stopped working there because it was dangerous, some of the lumps were as big as your head and could have killed anyone, probably me, working underneath. Not a good omen for the rest of the season, I hope the shelter goes up soon as we have no conservators to work on walls. The collapse caused only minimal damage to the east face of wall F.479 so I spent some of today recording it. It has a niche at the southern end F.480 and a peculiar wall feature F.481. F.479 is supposedly level VIII and the back of niche F.480 was plastered against the rear of wall F.449 to the west which is level IX which works stratigraphically to an extent as it shows the level IX building was built prior to the level VIII although I think that their life spans may well have overlapped. Hopefully tomorrow I remove the upper parts of wall F.479 and after that I may get back into building 18 as there will be no blatantly dangerous walls over my head.
The workmen continue to sieve (4321), they are still really slacking off and the pile will take a long time to clear at this rate. We have stopped sieving walls and I wonder if we will reach the point where we only sieve a proportion of the large relatively sterile deposits such as infilling. In some respects I am opposed to even not sieving walls as it looks like the start of a slippery slope. One of the main principals as I understood it was that we tried to look at material from all contexts by taking flotation samples from them all and sieving them all. Once you start treating some contexts in a more cursory manner you are really biasing your data and potentially excluding other archaeologists with different interests. Just because no one involved in the project has complained, although I’m not sure who has been told, doesn’t make it okay. We already privilege certain contexts, notably floors and those that are artefact rich, relative to others. If we start to denigrate some contexts what does this do to multivocality as we remove the ability of others to look at certain types of context simply because we deem them less important. We already have the situation where some specialists (micromorphology, chemical residue, bots and bones primarily) who are only able to look at a percentage of the contexts have looked mainly at a rather limited and biased range of contexts. Its something that appears to be very methodologically unsound to a humble excavator.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
