ABSTRACT
Fieldwork and excavation In the course of developing your understanding of the landscape and the human activities that contributed towards it you will come across many features that despite your best efforts remain unexplained. We have seen how survey techniques for measuring earthworks, or collecting pottery from the fields, begin to fill in pieces of the jigsaw that makes up the past. Special techniques such as aerial photography and geophysical surveys provide a few more pieces but there has always been a feeling that the full picture can only be revealed by excavation. Indeed, there was a time when archaeologists said things like ‘this problem can only be solved by excavation’. Excavation not only solves problems, it also creates them. Logistics, management, data handling and conservation will present their own difficulties and more questions. To top all this comes the reminder that excavation, rather like the dissection of anatomical specimens, destroys the very evidence it sets out to examine.
