Regarding the cost of creating the basic environmental index, we designed
the system for the Worcestershire HER with an appropriate level of detail
so that someone with relatively little knowledge of environmental
archaeology could enter the data (and that includes going through backlog
reports). However, an Environmental Assistant who as been working with me
for sometime has in fact been doing this work so that we could iron out
any problems and see how long it is likely to complete. If you have
problems getting an environmental specialist to do the work in your area,
I think it is possible for someone with general archaeological knowledge
to do this using a similar set-up. The only problem I can see is that
identifying key assemblages would require specialist knowledge, and there
may be the odd outstanding queries which could be put to a specialist.
To answer Nick's question about costing this, we simply used a sum of
money that was available to get as far as we could, and then assess the
cost of completing records for all the backlog. Although it has been
suprisingly quick to get through the reports for Worcestershire (in fact I
thought surely we've done more work than that!), had we included Worcester
City, it would have taken considerably longer. That is, reasonably large
urban areas could have a dramatic effect on the workload (assuming
environmental work is being routinely carried out...as it should be).
To clarify on using the EAB, until recently most of our environmental
reports in the local Transactions were not on the EAB, but it has now been
updated, and therefore I assume it would be a good place to start for most
areas.
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