uhm, well... they still dig in arbitrary levels; something called the "planum method," actually, which several individuals have argued simply couldn't exist, but...
stellenkarte are sheets of pre-printed cardboard (hence the "karte" part) for recording site info; "stelle" means place, and its use is very variable, and hard to explain
each stelle is recorded as a series of consecutive positions: 1, 2, 3, etc., each of which represents an activity performed within a stelle
so: position 1 might define the stelle; position 2 might tell you what piece of paper it was drawn on; position 3 might be the colour photos, position 4 might be the B&W, etc.
you also record the process: one of the position numbers might record the fact that you cleaned the surface of the stelle, another that you collected finds, another will be a soil description, etc.
so far it's not all that different from a british context sheet or any other form of documentation that records at the level of the stratigraphic unit (archaeological entity, stratum, etc.)
but a stelle can be a trench, it can be an area within a trench, it can be a context/entity/stratigraphic unit, an arbitrary level, it can be a test unit, it can be some portion of any of the above
so ontologically, it's very slippery indeed
in terms of trying to digitize, it's a nightmare; you can put all the stuff into a table, but how do you compare the contents of a column containing big long strings of text which describe the actions you have performed on any given stelle with its description, then cross-reference to the separate B&W and colour photos...?
most on-site discussions usually revolve around whether or not something requires a new stelle/position number, not interpretation or anything strictly archaeological...
if anyone is interested, i can send a short pdf document which outlines the card in a little more detail, but i don't want to flood the list (and as i remember, attachments are banned anyway...?); this is a corrected version of a paper i published in a series of session procedings collected under the title "digging in the dirt" (BAR, oxford, 2004) [for some reason one of the illustrations got lost in the published version]
i'm also writing about them in my dissertation
i don't know about the altmarkt; the north-south U-bahn, proclaimed the largest construction project in europe at the moment, budgeted for 640 million euros, is said to have set aside 1.4 million for archaeological work (it's only hitting part of the centre of the roman city, so it's not as if it was interesting or anything)
they keep the budget down by hiring students at low part-time wages; most of the students seem to be from other disciplines, in part because archaeology students go elsewhere to get experience & better pay...
& by doing a lot of the digging by machine

"paul courtney" <[log in to unmask]> schrieb:
> Geoff
> 
> Come on enlighten us on the StellenKarten system- hope they still don't
> dig by arbitrary layers as well in Koln.