On Sep 19, 2004, at 3:39 PM, Carol Serr wrote:

> That's my problem with hiring someone based only on their degree.  It
> seems
> most universities arent teaching students any practical skills to use
> in
> the CRM world of archy (where most of them will get their first job
> upon
> graduating).  They still teach field school excavation digging with
> trowels...i.e., S L O W paced.
Ah, the memory of Marshalltowns making that "ying, ying" sound as they
are scraped across concrete hard dirt at the bottom of 5 foot squares
in a broiling hot sun guaranteed to fry the brains of anything more
sentient than a historian ;>))
>   This doesnt exactly prepare graduates for
> real CRM excavation....nor all the other skills required...as Iain
> mentions.  There should be a 'trade school' type of course work...to
> produce better prepared CRM workers.

If ever there were a national competency evaluation for archaeologists,
dirt digging would be the downfall. Egads, that notion that digging is
a "trade" is so patently false, but so widely held. True, any BA archy
can dig a foot square hole, then a 2 foot square hole, and then perhaps
a 5 foot square hole. Amazing to think that some really feel that's all
of it.

Maybe it's a factor of the types of sites Americans typically get. Once
beneath the plowzone, features are all stratigraphically equal or maybe
with a few overlaps. If the most difficult stratigraphic sequence most
of us face is a wall in a builder's trench, then it may be
understandable. Perhaps too few of us get into nasty convoluted urban
archaeology.

Biddle at Winchester with Carter and Mackreth in the 1960's worked out
the principles of modern stratigraphic archaeology as we know it.
Harris codified it. They went through literally thousands of
layers/contexts per season. Even with that, there are Brit
archaeologists who couldn't dig their way out of the proverbial wet
paper bag as Paul Courtney has suggested. A good stratigrapher can dig
on anywhere on earth as the dirt obeys the same rules. Finds change and
we've moved generally past the 7 League Boot type of archaeology of
establishing stylistic/chronological sequences into doing things with
the sequences.

Archaeology has two inviolable rules: Go from the known to the unknown
and excavate in reverse order of deposition. At it's most basic, field
archaeology is concerned with the latest layer (or context or whatever
term du jour) in the stratigraphic sequence where one is working. The
relationship of that layer to the next youngest is all the digger
really has to be concerned with at the pointy end of the trowel.
Establishing that relationship and keeping relationships of subsequent
layers straight and in the correct sequence is the most basic digger
responsibility. Until the digger can do that, there should be no
vertical mobility.

BUT, this is not reality. We have situations where a former State
Archaeologist said that it was impossible to excavate layers in a pit
while digging down, so one dug one half of the pit in arbitrary levels,
and then read the section, and then attributed the finds from the first
half to the second half as it was being dug, but then drew no profiles.
There are archaeologists who dig across the short axis of features. We
have those who impose a grid on the site to start with and dig the
features according to the grid alignment. That ends up with Escher-like
problems in seeing the strata, much less interpreting them. We have
Review Staff who've looked at sections exposed with pits, midden and
stakeholes clearly exposed in the sides and said nothing was there.
some of these folks have Ph.D's, others have decades of "experience".
The problem with any of this is that equating competency with the level
of "degreedness" is a fatal mistake. Separating whether 25 years of
experience means 25 years doing the same year over and over Ground-Hog
Day fashion or whether maturation has occurred is the other end of the
so-called spectrum.

I think the cart's before the horse. The ability to excavate drives
interpretation. Without digging ability, one is not an archaeologist,
period. The exception is the synthesist typically in the University
setting who pulls together disparate threads from reports, makes
regional sense of the mish-mash and clarifies it in a defining
publication.

My tuppence worth.

Lyle Browning