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ascorbic
ascorbic
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Re: Silbury updates
Jun 27, 2007, 16:16
slumpystones wrote:

Well they are kind of...empty? I appreciate that they are largely removing 1969 infill, which should be clean, and I don't need a picture to know what a tyre looks like after 40 years in the ground, but for such a mammoth project I would have expected more info. If the archaeologists insisted on compiling the reports themselves then time should have been properly set aside to enable them to produce something worthy of publishing. Again, no blame on the guys on the ground, but yer man in Whitehall [or wherever] would probably have a week to work on it, and the saving of his time should have been available at Silbury.

I suppose we're blessed with instant-fix Time Team, with assumptions being made on the spot, but to have what appear to be two ditches and read no comment on them is frustrating. Nobody expects a carbon date, but an educated guess would be nice. It doesn't have to be conclusive, "It's a hill on a henge", but it would be nice to know the thoughts of those on the ground, rather than a sterile weekly report.

The image? Well that speaks for itself.


Well, the last update was about 1000 words. Last week there were two reports, adding up to about the same. I think you're spot-on with the Time Time comment. Most archaeologists treat that show in a similar way to host real CSIs treat that show - they hate the misleading impression it gives and the expectations it raises. You get an hour on Time Team, supposedly taken from three days of digging, when in fact Wessex have been spending much longer before and after sorting it out. There simply is not that much to report yet. Sure, you could pay a civil servant to work on them full time, and maybe you'd get a better report, but there's unlikely to be more information in it because there's not much more information to give. Is that really the best use of taxpayers' money?

In terms of the specifics, they haven't said more because they don't know yet! I believe they've found more stuff in the past couple of days (I could be wrong), so perhaps that will be in the next report. There's no point in making speculations at such an early stage. Sure it may satisfy curiousity and may turn out to be accurate, but I'm sure we can wait another week or so and know something concrete. Where speculation is useful, it has been put in. Read the reports and see.

Time is set aside for the archaeologists to work on them, to the extent that they're allowed to fit their other work around it, and can go and spend a few hours writing up notes, talking to the other archs and engineers, taking and assembling photos, preparing the report and so forth.

I don't know what other archaeological digs you're familiar with, but it's pretty rare to get anything close to this level of information while it's going on. Web updates, photos, videos, a visitor information point on site, staffed seven days a week by archaeologists who can answer questions, show finds and so on. The idea that they should employ someone full time in an office somewhere purely to write weekly reports seems a little bizarre to me. Are we that impatient? The updates let us know what's going on (and provide some interesting detail). The full site report will be published later, which will have all the nitty gritty detail and conclusions. That will be written after they've been able to appraise the whole project, run tests and so forth. It seems that people are expecting a Time Team Special or academic paper every week. 1000 words, six pages. I don't know what everyone's complaining about. The reports have plenty of interesting information to me.
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