ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the trends and issues that are now emergent from different methodological approaches to soil and sediment description. It illustrates with the example of one technique X-radiography applied to undisturbed sediment samples how to enhance the data available to archaeologists at a practical level. The chapter highlights areas of current methodological weakness and future research potential. It focuses on the relative merits of different systems for recording properties visible to the archaeologist in sections or in plan as contexts; much less attention has been given to whether the properties observed are meaningful. Through errors in recording, individual deposits or artefacts may become unstratified, as their stratigraphic contexts have been lost. The Harris matrix approach and its progenitors in excavation recording using methods other than single-context recording consistently define the components of the stratigraphy on the basis of the properties as described visually at the time of excavation, namely into contexts and interfaces.
