i have the "archaeological dialogues" article right in front of me right at this moment - i haven't had a chance to do a serious look at the context sheet (i'm still enamoured with the durham one, with the groovy icons) - but the idea of "confidence ratings" is good
i also just got a reaming from adrian himself (thanx anita: i owe you one!)
MoLAS has always had "your discussion: elaborate upon your basic interpretation, explaining why you have come to this conclusion and what evidence there is to support your argument" -
i think if you go back to the spence article in harris & brown & brown's "practices of archaeological stratigraphy" you find the problem of fatigue: the whole process becomes so mechanical after a while that people give up trying to think up new ways to explain what after a while just seems so self-evident ("it's a bloody pit, anyone can see it's a pit, why should i have to belabour the point?")
& this is where i see a solution of the description/interpretation divide (& i discussed this with hodder in the contexts of an incomplete paper which responds to "the archaeological process"), since i see that as being part of an argument, a rational process: here is my interpretation, and here is the evidence i present to support that interpretation, and here are the reasons [discussion] why i make this interpretation and why i reject these alternates, which i have also considered...
basically the same process you would undergo presenting evidence in court, writing an essay, etc.
woolley also suggested we first have observation, then description & interpretation... we have to perceive context boundaries & soil colour changes etc. before we can either describe or interpret them...
anyway - metaphysix, ontology, etc. - don't want to get into it here
i have read lucas, and have the macdonald institute book (hodder et everyone) on catalhuyuk, and something somewhere on one of the heathrow projects (many thanx for the other sources; will definitely check them out)
but: my problem is that all of this (hard-core reflexivity?) is so far removed from what i'm seeing here & what i expect is pretty much the case outside of the UK that we might as well not be talking about the same discipline at all -
my session on fieldwork methodologies at the EAA in stuttgart in 2001 was cancelled because "scientists" (hyperbolically, those following in wincklemann's tradition: i keep being told i'm not an archaeologist because i can't read latin) don't talk about methodology, that's for "technicians" (i.e. the guys who document the stuff dug up by the "navvies"...)
i'm still planning to get back to working on a paper about the difficulties of bringing SCP/R to sites where the area supervisor does the documentation, the site director never heard of the harris matrix before the excavation began (& he was more interested in getting the containers into position than learning about the documentation system), and your workforce is mostly a group of housewives and the odd drunk you try to keep away from the heavy machinery and from falling in the excavated wells...
as i told adrian: we ain't going to raise wages in these circumstances or even be treated like skilled labourers because the labourers are unskilled and the only skills that matter are the ability to read latin, knowing typologies, decyphering iconography...
exaggerating a little: there are now some training excavations, and a few courses on theory being offered here & there, and the prehistoric archaeology does seem less like art history than do the real/classical archaeology ("archaeologie" is technically our classical archaeology, without all this "archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" mumbo-jumbo), but... still a long way to go before we start worrying about having "embodied, sensual encounters"