The person who spoke at the conference (Craig Cressford, who isn't on this
list) replies as follows:

[snip]

My basic line of argument was that we define contexts in the normal way but
also do some arbitrary sub-division of units to look for vertical and
horizontal spatial patterning. When we think that there were events which
must have taken place, but were either missed during excavation or were
archaeologically undetectable at the time but can be inferred from other
evidence, we add contexts in. I also said that we will have to cope with the
results of micromorphology which might indicate a greater or smaller number
of contexts than defined in the field. Finds specialists results
might indicate that some units consist of more than one depositional event
that were excavated as one, and that in some instances finds may have been
ascribed to the wrong context, ie they were on a floor but were recorded as
part of the layer above, and would need to be 'moved'. I also said that the
presence of specialists in the field affected how we work and the sampling
strategy.

Whether these things lead to the 'invention' of new context numbers in
post-excavation or are simply mentioned in the text depends I think on the
circumstances.

I didn't think that any of this was particularly controversial or even very
post-processual and they are all things that I have seen done in British
field archaeology. The only great claim I remember making was that perhaps
by a combination of these elements and by sometimes modifying what we
define as 'contexts' we might begin to tackle the problem of increasing the
temporal dimension as it is depicted in the harris matrix which has been
long recognised as a problem (eg Dalland and Carver etc).

[end snip]

Cheers,

James


----- Original Message -----
From: geoff carver <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>;
<[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>; <[log in to unmask]>;
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Sent: Friday, February 11, 2000 6:49 PM
Subject: "Scientific" (fwd)


just in case you'd been wondering (as indeed i have been) just how it's
done:

> By the way, I have just been to a conference in Cambridge (Interpreting
>  Strat., our 8-year old baby is cicking again) there was someone who works
in
>  Chtalhuyuk "post-processual"-style. Now I understand what that means:
They
>  apply contexts in the post-processual frame of mind they know already
that
>  this is pretty arbirtary and "imperical"; then they take soil samples
which
>  provide a micro-morphology. Then they realise from the sample results the
>  post-processual processes within the record. Then they change the context
>  numbers or insert new ones; (then they are quite confused and rearrange
the
>  sequence, he admitted, which is complicated and takes a long time to sort
>  out). All I think would be clear if they worked on two levels: ex and
>  post-ex. If they stuck to their ex stratigraphy record they could make an
>  overlay according to sampling results. That would be really scientific,
two
>  approaches compared. Instead of throwing the safty net away they could
make
>  really nice piroettes in the air afterwards with the micro-results -
>  summersolts.


geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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