Plan (archaeology)

(Redirected from Archaeological plan)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (August 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (November 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

(Learn how and when to remove this message)

In archaeological excavation, a plan is a drawn record of features and artifacts in the horizontal plane.

Overview

Archaeological plan can either take the form of

a "multi context" plan, which is drawn with many contexts on it to show relationships between these features as part of some phase, or
alternatively a single context plan with a single feature is drawn .

Excavated features are drawn in three dimensions with the help of drawing conventions such as hachures. Single context planning developed by the Museum of London has become the professional norm. The basic advantage of single context planning is context plans draw on "transparent perma-trace paper" can be overlaid for re-interpretation at a later date.

Multi-context Plans as opposed to single context plans can be made of complete sites, trenches or individual features. In the United Kingdom, the scale of the plans is usually 1:20. They are linked to the site recording system by the inclusion of known grid points and height readings, taken with a dumpy level or a total station (see surveying). Excavation of a site by the removal of human made deposits in the reverse order they were created is the preferred method of excavation and is referred to as stratigraphic area excavation "in plan" as opposed to excavation "in section". Plan and section drawings have an interpretive function as well as being part of the recording system, because the draughts-person makes conscious decisions about what should be included or emphasised.

Archaeological plan topics

The grid

It is common and good practice on excavations to lay out a grid of 5m squares so as to facilitate planning. This grid is marked out on-site with grid pegs that form the baselines for tapes and other planning tools to aid the drawing of plans. It is also common practice that planning is done for each context on a separate piece of perma-trace that conforms to these 5m grid squares. This is part of the single context recording system (see Fig 1.) The site grid should be tied into a national geomatic database such as the Ordnance survey

Planning drawing conventions

Archaeological planners use various symbols to denote characteristics of features and contexts and while conventions vary depending on practitioner, the following are representative:

Pre-excavation and base plans

On sites with little stratigraphic depth, a pre-excavation multi-context plan is sometimes made of all visible features before any excavation is carried out. This helps in planning strategy since problems of stratigraphy on rural sites are minimal as features often cut into the natural minimizing issues of inter-cutting features. Conversely, planning a multi-context urban site is difficult to achieve on a multi-context plan as the features and deposits when planned will obscure each other on the same planning sheet.

Critics of pre-excavation planning

Pre-excavation plans have been critiqued as being of limited use on urban or deeply stratified sites and have also been attacked in professional archaeology where they have been described as a misused tool of the unscrupulous operators to give the impression the archaeological record for a given site has been dealt with adequately.

This critical point of view contends, that comparisons between pre and post-excavation plans can demonstrate that a site has not been comprehensively excavated on the basis of a pre-ex plan alone. In many cases there is a pronounced difference between the two phases of planning. Although many features may be visible at ground level following machining, it is often the case that the true limits of features are not so initially discernible until the area of the feature is fully cleaned and subsequently excavated revealing further features and relationships lower in the sequence.

References

Pre-19th century	Edmond Halley Charles-René de Fourcroy Joseph Priestley Gaspard Monge
19th century	Charles Dupin Adolphe Quetelet André-Michel Guerry William Playfair August Kekulé Charles Joseph Minard Francis Amasa Walker John Venn Oliver Byrne Matthew Sankey Charles Booth John Snow Florence Nightingale Karl Wilhelm Pohlke Toussaint Loua Francis Galton
Early 20th century	Edward Walter Maunder Otto Neurath W. E. B. Du Bois Henry Gantt Arthur Lyon Bowley Howard G. Funkhouser John B. Peddle Ejnar Hertzsprung Henry Norris Russell Max O. Lorenz Fritz Kahn Harry Beck Erwin Raisz
Mid 20th century	Jacques Bertin Rudolf Modley Arthur H. Robinson John Tukey Mary Eleanor Spear Edgar Anderson Howard T. Fisher
Late 20th century	Borden Dent Nigel Holmes William S. Cleveland George G. Robertson Bruce H. McCormick Catherine Plaisant Stuart Card Pat Hanrahan Edward Tufte Ben Shneiderman Michael Friendly Howard Wainer Clifford A. Pickover Lawrence J. Rosenblum Thomas A. DeFanti George Furnas Sheelagh Carpendale Cynthia Brewer Jock D. Mackinlay Alan MacEachren David Goodsell Kwan-Liu Ma Michael Maltz Leland Wilkinson Alfred Inselberg
Early 21st century	Ben Fry Jeffrey Heer Jessica Hullman Gordon Kindlmann Aaron Koblin Christopher R. Johnson Manuel Lima David McCandless Mauro Martino John Maeda Miriah Meyer Tamara Munzner Ade Olufeko Hanspeter Pfister Hans Rosling Claudio Silva Moritz Stefaner Fernanda Viégas Martin Wattenberg Bang Wong Hadley Wickham

Misplaced Pages