The quickest I've ever seen to completely understand the principles of
stratigraphy was a fellow who was a nuclear physics major and it took
20 minutes. "Boing" you could see lights going on. Slowest was, well,
never. Left to one's own devices, digging on simple and later on
complicated stratigraphy, about 10-15 months of continuous, daily work
gets most folks to where they are either going to understand or not. A
good intensive training on the job time would be about 5 months. That
has to be just the digging part. Of course, if one understands
stratigraphy, profile drawing shouldn't pose any problems.

There are two problems in the academic world that argue against a
change in training techniques. The first is the old ego issue. "We're
Bloviatus U, arguably the best in archaeology on this continent and who
are you, sir, to indicate that we aren't". The other is a variation on
the first with "I'm Prof. Bloviatus and you say you wish to train my
students outside my realm. Whatever am I to do with my tied labor force
to dig my pet site if I can't abuse them properly."

Most come out of the miserably short field schools with the basic
mechanics of field archaeology. How to dig a hole with a shovel, how to
trowel a surface (although not always), how to string a level, how to
screen dirt, how to bag a find, how to distinguish a find from "that
which is not", and always how to get a tan, drink more beer than one
can hold, etc. All of that's good, but it is literally the absolute
bottom rung of knowledge of field archaeology. The dimmer will confuse
the mechanics of field archaeology with the practice of field
archaeology.

One particular fellow I had the misfortune to work with was in his
forties and was still a knuckle-dragging trowel bum. Others before me
had tried to teach him and he had a few of the techniques. I added to
them. When he came to a problem he couldn't solve, he literally went
from technique 1 to 12 in sequence before I made the rounds again and
had the feature so muddled that it took half an hour to get it sorted
out. Literally nothing with more than half a dozen layers lying one
sequence was he not capable of misunderstanding. Multiply this by the
days in the digging year and one sees that this fellow was one of those
who was completely incapable of looking at the ground and reading the
clues and operating in a stratigraphically logical fashion.

As Virgil Noble has said, those sorts cause problems on CRm projects
and would cause problems anywhere else as they were occupying space
that a competent digger would otherwise take. Most folks require
remedial training and most require training beyond the basics for one
simple reason. And that is that they're not trained to understand how
to operate on strata. Oh, they may understand the theory, but haven't
made the jump from translating the words on the page to making the
trowel in the hand work on the dirt in front of their eyes to test for
superposition. Granted some of these are the same folks who want to 3d
plot plowzone artifacts on a site with a bulldozer coming at them in
the next day.

Lyle Browning