As far as UK is concerned systematic open area excavation was introduced 
at Wharram Percy by John Hurst and his colleagues I guess at the end of 
the 1950s. Jack  Golson (subseuently ANU in Australia) was sent off to 
Denmark to learn the method from Axel Steensberg who was digging rural 
medieval sites. When I started digging as a schoolboy in the late 1960s 
it was perhaps not universal but pretty standard on sites of all periods 
when one had any resources. The 1970s saw the Chris Musson, Bill 
Britnell  and Graeme Guilbert strip big areas of Iron Age hillforts and 
Francis Pryor huge prehistoric sites on the fen edge gravels. A lot of 
people experimented with new methods like using levelled plans to 
reconstrct sections at will and digging features the way they were 
infilled minmising dug sections. The big shift was winter digging in 
towns and the creation of full-time excavation units. This created its 
own problems such as the increasing expense of urban excavtions eg from 
shoring alone and the build up of publication backlogs. A far as 
colouring goes I think hardly anyone has time certainly not in the 
commercial world.






geoff carver wrote:

>that's one of those things i find hard to document; other sources (barker?) say open area came from some of van gennep's work in the netherlands... maybe the dutch started it, but no one read dutch reports, the danish caught on/reinvented the wheel, & it spread from there...?
>martin carver & a few other critix don't like it cuz it is so systematic - strictly ordinal -
>i'm also looking at a case where the matrix & context sheets were introduced (by london exiles in the early 1990s) then discarded for something i find mind-bogglingly complex...
>
>"paul.courtney2" <[log in to unmask]> schrieb:
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>>style of excavation but there was a move away from sections as open area
>>excavation (adopted from Danish rural excavations) became the norm. 
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