On 8 Sep 2003 at 16:50, Larry Porter wrote:

> Jumping into the measurement fray with my 2 cents worth. I much prefer
> to use the metric system for ALL archeology, historic and that other
> kind. Mostly because it makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to make
> scale maps and drawings......

Well, yes, I basically agree.  Except that now, we at least, are
getting tremendous cooperation from our clients in that they are
providing the CAD files for their projects.  We just drop our mapping
over theirs, benefiting from things like 1 foot contours, existing
structures and features, planned alterations, and many other details
that would take us some time to replicate - kind of ridiculous
considering the client has already paid for it once.  We provide them
our file when we complete the project and they know exactly where we
are talking about.  The catch is that those files are always in feet
and inches (or sometimes tenths of feet, but I haven't run into that
recently).  So even though we mostly excavate in metrics, I do all
our mapping in feet, it's just plain easier to incorporate into the
existing maps - then I provide both metric and, well, my physics
teacher called it the furlong per fortnight system, visual scales.


 ...... Not to mention most
> graph paper is metric.

Interesting, last time I tried to get some I had to special order it
here in central California.