With reference to one specific excavation of your choice, describe and illustrate the various components of the excavation process and the way in which the results of the work have been published.

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With reference to one specific excavation of your choice, describe and illustrate the various components of the excavation process and the way in which the results of the work have been published.

The excavation of the Romano-British town of Wroxeter has developed over a course of over 100 years and has covered only a small section of the archaeology of the civitas despite being the fourth largest Romano-British town. Excavation is primarily the more physical approach to uncovering a site and it is a destructive technique that is used. Even if trowelling is carefully pursued some pre-excavation is needed, to identify not only the site itself but also the places of interest where a trench could be dug. The most prominent non-destructive technique to do this by is geophysical surveying which was used exceedingly in the Wroxeter Hinterland Project (Renfrew et al. 2008: 102). Of course excavation is obviously considered to just be about “digging” but without a range of scientific approaches there is little evidence about the true identity of a site. Also, without using stratigraphy we would not be able to “read subtle changes … [to] study the human past” (Stein 1993: 1) as the layers of sediment uncovers where past life and environments lived simultaneously. The way in which results are published is vast when it comes to looking at a site, the primary way being through ways of an archaeological report but on site before results are published a lot of work must be done through methods like planning grids or context sheets. The excavation process draws upon various different methods to uncover past human life and reveals how the past is directly linked to the present day.

The process of pre-excavation on a site is as important as excavation itself and there are various different methods which are used and Barker (1986) puts the non-destructive techniques into ten distinct steps, only some of which are relevant to the excavation at Wroxeter.

Notably speaking the first step would be the reviewing of appropriate documents. According to Barker (1986: 55) “Documentary references to archaeological sites may simply be a passing reference to … an early manuscript” so exemplifying how documents are directly linked to the discovery of a site. The more complete the documentation the more likely it is that site will be dug (Barker 1986: 56). In Wroxeter, as highlighted by White et al. (2006: 13), antiquarian accounts are very useful for looking at “the Old Work” and is referred to by William Camden  and in particular by “Thomas Wright, the first antiquarian to excavate the site”. However, without drawings and maps there is little evidence for sites.

Also, looking at drawings and maps gives us a direct correlation into its observation and “site’s context” (Barker 1986: 57). In particular at Wroxeter there are three such productions spanning from 1721 to 1812 giving us insight into what “The Old Work” looked like and the initial discovery of the baths (White et al. 2006: 13-15). For Wroxeter itself there are very few maps dating before the 19th century (White et al. 2006). There has been much interest archaeologically speaking for Wroxeter for over two centuries.

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Barker (1986: 57-8) considers that even if the previous work on a site is “wildly inaccurate” the results can be very “informative”. Most notable for the initial excavations at Wroxeter is the work of Wright in the 18th century, Fox in the late 19th and early 20th century and Atkinson later in the early 20th century (White et al. 2006). These men uncovered a major part of the Romano-British town for modern excavations to follow on from.

The Wroxeter Hinterland Project illustrates the importance of Geophysical surveying in revealing the size of a site, extent of occupation and Romanization (Buteux ...

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