Oops: the site is gone.

Digging is one thing. Recording is another. When digging you often feels empowered as discoverer: you are the one who removed the soil, who identified a layer, who brought the finds triumphantly down the hill to the depot. Your muscle power and dominant presence on site got things done, at speed in difficult circumstances, when conditions were hard. You made the primary record and led the celebrations. The infallible site record remains in your head, as you were the author of a sequence that is now long gone: a series of soil layers mixed up and now consigned to the spoil heap. Well, not quite. Sites do not ‘exist’ in this form for long. Exhilarating as it may be to work out-of-doors in the company of muscular sun-tanned friends, digging up relics together, the real work of excavation, in terms of what will endure, happens outside of the trench.

Ideally, this second stage should not happen far away: finds should be primary processed (washed, weighed, bulk photographed) and conserved on site, at the trench edge, and excavators made immediately aware of the finds contents of layers, so that they can distinguish backfill from secondary and primary deposits, and dig layers appropriately, especially if mixing can be identified.  This is reflexive digging with live feedback. If finds are taken to a depot and never seen again, a sense of alienation with finds builds. Diggers take no more interest and finds specialists do not see their material being excavated. Generic background materials that often tell us what type of stratigraphy we are dealing with are lost, as low value materials are discarded in depots and pottery or bone escapes photographic record, as materials are sent off to different experts – in short, a contextual overview of finds is lost, as stratigraphic material. Equally, all drawn plans and sections need to be digitised on site and then returned to supervisors for checking, in case errors and confusions occur. A basic sequence needs to be established before a site can be backfilled, with clearly labelled context photos and a complete set of context descriptions. Otherwise, serious errors cannot be rectified.

At Sagalassos, this second stage of excavation could not be achieved, for a variety of reasons. Simon, the lead draughtsman and expert digitiser, had to leave after a few days, so the link between site records and digitisation went online, with files being separated from our common dropbox archive by use of google docs, one drive and other features which removed our live single point of reference. Then there was our shortage of ‘toughbooks’: we ended up with one onsite recording device meaning that this was continually used and I as director had no check on what had been recorded and what had not. This was partially mitigated by Solinda and Francis taking paper records for their areas. Yet the great dream escaped, of a single live online recording system, where all recording is transparent and holes can be plugged before it is too late. Finally, a lack of serious archiving in Wk 3 relating to all of the above caused difficulty: who wants to be the IT guy managing records when there is fun to be had outside? My own absence for two days for the job interview did not help the final archiving, that Francis has set up when he was there to do it.

Memories of our site. The drama of the crane on day 2.