Good scientific enquiry is always characterised by selection of
> data (including personal or reflective data) to create robust explanations out
> of the myriad of conflicting and confusing archaeological data. Understanding
> is not generated by total data collection, but by asking questions of
> selected data and generating new data sets to support that understanding of
> past human behaviour.
Yes, but if the data you need has been destroyed, you are stuffed! I
appreciate your frustration with large quantities of seemingly useless data,
but we *cannot* know what may be vital for the archaeologists of the future.
I can give you a specific example of this. All the pottery from the early
digs (1945-6) at Lackford went to Moyses Hall in Bury St Eds. Due to space
pressures, the then curator asked my mother (Teresa Briscoe, then Home) if
she would object if he disposed of the fragmentary sherds and kept only
those that could be reasonably reassembled into urns. She agreed and a large
quantity of AS pottery was then dumped -- no-one knows where or how.
On more than one occasion after the Archive was founded in 1980, she
lamented the fact to me that she had agreed to this disposal and speculated
about what evidence had been lost. But it was quite standard practice at the
time. I can name you 5 or 6 other sites in East Anglia alone where only the
intact or near-intact urns were preserved.
> There isn't the time or the money in all the world to store, manage, and
> analyse the terabytes of info now being collected.
I quite agree. If a museum or Unit can't store everything from an
excavation, then the less-perishable items (such as pottery and stone)
should be re-interred at the site where they were found in a
carefully-marked location (in a concrete vault?) and accompanied with a
brief record inscribed on stone or concrete of when they were dug up, when
they were re-buried, and where the rest of the site was recorded -- if it
ever was (hello Loveden Hill, hello Sancton, and etc....). Then at least the
evidence would be available for future researchers &/or excavators close to
its original context.
Yours ever
Diana C. Briscoe
Archive of Anglo-Saxon Pottery Stamps
124 Cholmley Gardens
Fortune Green Road
London NW6 1AA
Tel: +44(0)20 77946300
Fax: +44(0)20 74311612
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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