The great thing about learning to dig in Britain is the great a variety 
of geology and soils in a very small geographical area. I learnt a lot 
in my youth from digging on a wide variety of sites of different periods 
with very different soils.A pity I am now too rheumatic (the bad thing 
is our *** wet weather) to use some of the skills I picked up like being 
able to dig features entirely by feel- very useful on silt and clay 
soils. Once visited a site in a Roman fortress where they claimed it was 
sterile. I tried pointing out those shallow patches of 1-3 cms  of dark 
soil where the subsidence in the top of massive post pits but they would 
have none of it.  

paul courtney

Tim Thompson wrote:
> I remember being "B"-mused and not a little "A"mused the first time I saw Schiffer's 'transformational grammar.' It still seems to me, as it did then, to be making a fetish of the obvious. Fairbanks quietly pointed out to his students (including me) that you had to document intrusion and in-situ soil changes (eluviation, gleying, etc.) in order to understand what had happened in the past. No elaborate hierarchical naming exercise was required -- mostly just common sense, and good drawing and photographic skills. This was when Schiffer was still an undergraduate, I believe.
>
> And, oh yes, my undergraduate program at Florida included  a couple of excellent geology course including Geoological Stratigraphy. In graduate school at Catholic we took soil science courses and geomorphology (provide through the DC consortium). The need for the skills and insights obtained from our dirt- and rock-hopping academic cousins does seem to be so obvious that it is surprising to discover that they are not always required.
>
> But it's probably unfair to blame the excavators for their ignorance. Rather, their mentors were at fault and all should work to correct these deficiencies. No amount of behavioural, processual, post-processual or whatever, theory and class work will correct flawed data by excavators who don't fully understand the dirt.
>
> Tim Thompson
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------
>   
>> Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 00:00:37 -0700
>> From: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: HISTARCH Digest - 23 Aug 2007 to 24 Aug 2007 (#2007-24)
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>> There are 9 messages totalling 469 lines in this issue.
>>
>> Topics of the day:
>>
>>   1. recording evidence of post-depositional transformations (8)
>>   2. post-dep & recording
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Date:    Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:20:22 +0200
>> From:    geoff carver 
>> Subject: recording evidence of post-depositional transformations
>>
>> usual apologies for x-posting, but i'm trying to guage how much =
>> influence schiffer might have had on the discipline, and how =
>> stratigraphy is now perceived...
>> do people generally/systematically record evidence of possible =
>> disturbance (roots, frost, rodent/worm holes, etc.; and if so, how?), or =
>> just make a note in the site diary, or just discard anything that's =
>> "obviously" intrusive (modern coins, etc.), or... what do they do?
>> does anybody still "assume" that "artifacts contained within a given =
>> stratum are more or less contemporary"?
>>
>>     
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
>  There are many diffierent ways of  recording, documenting, 
>   
>> curating, and, yes, interpreting archaeology site  formation, transformation 
>> and the like. Michael Schiffer came up with a  good pioneering methodology, but 
>> there are others to consider as well.
>>  
>> Ron May
>> Legacy 106, Inc. 
>>
>>
>>
>> ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at 
>> http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>>     
>
>