Scale and archaeological evaluations: What are we looking for?

Abstract

It is axiomatic that archaeological investigations rely on scaling up. We examine residues, mere traces, of past activity and attempt to say something meaningful about the totality of the events they represent. More pertinently to the theme of this paper, as a rule we sample these residues and make a prediction about the character and extent of archaeological remains from which we interpret past events. Whether we sample individual sites or large landscapes, most archaeological endeavor entails only examining a part of the whole, and this has always been the case. Today, the majority of archaeological excavations in the UK take place within the framework of development and its attendant planning legislation, and decisions on whether to undertake excavations in advance of development are usually based upon some sort of an evaluation of the presence/absence and significance of archaeological remains on a site. This may be just a ''rule of thumb'' assessment of the likely presence of sites, a formal and in-depth desk-based appraisal or a more detailed non-intrusive or intrusive evaluation: fieldwalking, geophysical survey or machine trenching. Whatever the technique of assessment, a curator or development-control officer has to scale up, to decide from a small amount of evidence what this represents in terms of the totality of the remains on the site. A decision must then be taken about whether further investigation is required. The background to this paper was a study by Oxford Archaeology which looked at twelve major infrastructure projects in southern England that were subsequently excavated, in order to assess the success of the evaluations undertaken for predicting archaeological remains and providing a suitable basis for making decisions about further appropriate levels of work on these sites (Hey and Lacey, 2001). The project, known as Planarch, was jointly funded by English Heritage and the European Union as part of its European Regional Development fund, which considers spatial planning (the Interregional IIC programme). It was initiated by Kent County Council and followed an earlier study undertaken by Southampton University (Champion et al., 1995). The Planarch study suggests that archaeologists have allowed their preconceptions of the past to dominate sampling strategies. Not only that, a trench-eye view has restricted our archaeological vision and limited the scope of our fieldwork. As a result, we tend to find what we expect to find, unless we come across the unexpected in the course of other work. An unthinking use of statistical approaches to sampling archaeological sites may additionally have reinforced this attitude. Recognizing the difficulties involved in detecting sites by survey methods, a number of authors have pointed out problems and suggested remedies (e.g., Nance and Ball, 1986; Wobst, 1983) and in particular in the British context have suggested that archaeologists should focus much more clearly on the sites that they wish to identify and develop strategies to locate these more effectively (Orton, 2000:115-147). This may be appropriate if we are looking for something specific or can accurately predict what is there, but this is seldom the case. As a result there has been a tendency to develop sampling strategies to locate the remains that are anticipated, thus creating an in-built bias towards finding those sites. In addition, when estimating appropriate sample sizes there has been a tendency to model sites as solid blocks which, of course, they are not. Archaeological statisticians have warned of precisely these drawbacks (e.g., Shennan, 1988:323-8; Orton, 2000:120 -2), but their cautions have seldom been heeded. More commonly, however, archaeologists have paid little attention to mathematical modeling of evaluation methods and have adopted a suite of strategies as a matter of custom, with little thought as to how this might be affecting perceptions of past human activity. Equally worrying is that the debate surrounding the methods of evaluating areas of potential archaeological interest has focused almost entirely on finding ''sites'', by which we generally mean occupation areas or monuments. Human activity is, of course, much more wide ranging than this. Given theoretical concerns about understanding human agency and how people used the wider landscape and conceptualized the space around them, which have been part of mainstream archaeological theory for well over a decade (e.g., Barrett, 1993; Tilley, 1994), it is surprising that modern fieldwork has failed to grasp the challenge of seeking physical evidence for some of the events undertaken on this wider stage. Should we not be aspiring to capture a more complete record of the traces of past human activities and an understanding of what lay in the spaces between ''sites''? Over recent years, major infrastructure projects in southern Britain have entailed more work than ever before, involving archaeological operations sometimes on an enormous scale. This means that much larger areas than previously have been exposed with care and observed by archaeologists, and it has been possible to assess how successful the evaluation techniques that were used really were. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.