3.3 The Dig
The excavation itself! The bread and butter of archaeology is described in this lesson, taking you through the purpose and process of each step. Excavation can be a long, difficult process - particularly when excavating in adverse weather or when extraordinary care is required. It can also be extraordinarily exciting, and is one of the only ways somebody can ever hope to lay eyes on an archaeological structure, object, or landscape that nobody has seen in the tens, hundreds or thousands of years since it was deposited.
Purpose
The purpose of the full excavation is methodologically complex but theoretically simple – discover and record as much archaeological information as possible. The first step is to, based on the survey and trial methods, select the area or areas of a site that are best excavated. A careful consideration of time and workforce is required here, as over- or under-shooting what can be carried out in the excavation window can cause serious problems. For example, if a research excavation by a university has 30 trained specialists for two full months on a complex Roman fort, they can realistically target the most archaeologically dense area of the site to uncover. If the same site were being excavated for two weeks with 10 novice archaeologists, a smaller area would have to be targeted. This is not necessarily a problem, as many sites are excavated over a series of years – gradually uncovered more and more as they are revisited and further excavated over time. In the perfect scenario this allows a complete excavation, where every archaeological feature is fully excavated and everything left behind is recorded to be analysed in the future. Such excavations are rare and expensive, however.
Commercial archaeologyArchaeological work conducted by professional companies, often as part of the planning process before construction to preserve heritage. units can rarely afford to plan long-term. Because commercial excavation tends to happen in advance of construction work, there may not be a site left (or at least accessible) the next year. As such commercial units endeavour to get as full an understanding of a site as possible in as little time as possible – prioritising complex, stratigraphically telling areas and rarely committing to complete excavation. As such most commercial excavations try to hit a certain percentage of the site, such as a 20% excavation where every archaeological feature that has been identified will have 20% of its total footprint uncovered and recorded. This means that the site cannot be fully understood. Not every piece of material culture can be recovered. Skeletons, pottery, jewellery, will never see the light of day. The unfortunate reality of archaeological work is that it is a time intensive and exhaustive process that can never truly uncover the totality of a site or ever fully understand the past. But we keep trying to understand as much as we can.