Greg,
How do you extend its use to standing structures?
Jeff
 
Jeffrey L. Boyer, RPA
Office of Archaeological Studies
P.O. Box 2087
Santa Fe, New Mexico  87504
tel: 505.827.6343
fax: 505.827.3904
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
 

________________________________

From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY on behalf of Greg Jackman
Sent: Sun 10/16/2005 7:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Harris Matrix



I tend to agree with other discussants that there is little to be gained
from colouring or otherwise laboriously keying sections or matrices
simply in order to represent some perceived visual characteristic.  Such
diagrams are schematic representations of stratigraphic relationships
defined by archaeologists, not photographic snapshots of some kind of
objective truth.  We do actually have a 'shading key' for Port Arthur,
but with the increasing use of computers, CAD etc., for representing
stratigraphy, the use of simple illustrative coding is being relegated
in favour of a range of other phenomenological attributes that can be
electronically linked to the drawing.

We also use the Harris matrix system as a standard method, and as Iain
has pointed out, extend its use to standing structures where it
accommodates excavation, extant recording and historical information.
After all, how often does one work on a building where there may be no
surviving evidence of a feature but people remember it.

Greg Jackman
ARCHAEOLOGY MANAGER

Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority
Port Arthur
Tasmania
Australia  7182

Ph: (03) 62 512 336
Fax: (03) 62 512 322

Visit our new website: www.portarthur.org.au


-----Original Message-----
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
paul.courtney2
Sent: Monday, 17 October 2005 6:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Harris Matrix

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:
>
> 
>
>>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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