Geoff Carver wrote:

> some of the german archaeologists i was working with had never
> heard of silt ("Schluff")

Let them consult the "Bodenkundliche Kartieranleitung" ed. by AG
Boden, Bundesanstalt für Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe in den
Geologischen Landesämtern in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

> - then to think about the
> german tendency to use pencil crayons for naturalistic shading of field
> drawings, versus the british tendency to use colours to code finds
> (green for bronze, black for charcoal, etc.) & different forms of
> hatching for composition/texture which got me thinking that, if one
> group is documenting colour & the other soil composition, aren't they
> documenting different things...? which would sort of imply different
> assemblages if colour & composition did not necessarily correspond...?

No, because on the drawings there should always be a description
for each layer/structure, where also the composition of the soil
etc. is mentioned.
What I know from here is a kind of combination of the mentioned
methods, with colour codes that are quite close to the natural
color - as you mentioned: black for charcoal, green for bronze...
so the differences in documentation don't seem very important to
me.

JS.