even when you are digging stratigraphically, i still think it's a good idea to
leave maybe half your strata as a control profile, especially if you've been
having trouble detecting changes as you're going down: i have worked on many
sites where you can only see some changes in the profile, and it also helps when
 
you leave the site overnite or for the weekend, cuz your surfaces always change
colour, and you won't be sure when you get back just where you are layerwise -
        as to the unstratified stuff: i've seen it a lot, too: mostly bronze age
or earlier, where all the organix and damned near everything else has already
been leached out of the soil: but has anyone done any micromorphologix on stuff
like that? is it really unstratified? and if you plot your finds 3D, can you
maybe "recreate" strata that way?
        going back to harris and his theory of archaeological stratigraphy (he
ain't good for just his matrices, you know!): he's only interested in the
interfaces between layers, because therein lie your old floors and other living
spaces: people did not live or work or whatever inside strata: anything that's
inside got there from bioturb, or soil formation, or whatever other process you
might want to think up - which is where you go back to something as "feared and
loathed" as that soils description bitmap i made the mistake of sending sometime
 
back: what is this stuff, and how did it get there? strata aren't there just so
you have a nice and convenient way of grouping your artifacts (as some people i
have the [mis]fortune to work with would seem to think)...
 
geoff carver
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