ABSTRACT
In archaeological surveys of earthworks, however, contours may not successfully convey the desired information, as the artificial changes in slope are often very slight, and they may also follow a very complex pattern, especially in the case of multi-phase structures. Bettess (1992) refers to some of the problems of interpreting contours from archaeological earthworks, and Fletcher and Spicer (1992) give an even more extreme (though by no means unparalleled) example of slight earthworks resulting from multiple phases of activity of different kinds. (They also present an ingenious way of analysing this complexity.) As Bettess points out, contour lines without information about their height are virtually useless, but on the other hand labelling them adequately may be difficult to achieve without making a drawing very cluttered. In a digital mapping environment it’s easy enough to employ a colour scale to indicate elevation values but in publications it won’t always be possible to use colour, and in the case of complex earthworks even colour may not serve to produce a map which can easily be interpreted.
