Lobbyist's "Red Herring" a Red Herring

[Sigh] Peter Tompa appends a comment to Andy Baines' post "David Knell and Paul Barford are missing the point" (Thursday, 6 March 2014) once again demonstrating - if more demonstration was required - that he is utterly incapable of understanding something as rocket-science like as gridded fieldwalking. Detectorist Baines had been wondering why taking material out of surface scatters could be considered as causing distortion of the evidence. I set out to attempt to explain it to people confused by this issue. I thought I'd presented it in a fairly understandable way (that was my intent) and Mr Baines had no further questions. I was underestimating the US trade lobbyist's inability to cope with Plain English and worth-a-thousand-words pictures. But then, my text was not written with such people in mind. Anyhow, "Cultural Property Observer" Tompa could not understand what it's all about, and appended a comment to Mr Baines' post to say so:

This is a red herring. Archaeologists don't record everything either; in fact the usual process is to excavate down to the juicy area (throwing out everything in the process) and then "meticulously recording." In places like Israel, this means blowing through hundreds of years of Ottoman and Byzantine history to get to the Classical levels. In places like Iraq by contrast, evidence of Jews has been regularly destroyed. 

The only red herring, Jewish or otherwise, is Mr Tompa's apparent confusion of the notion of surface survey with excavation. The clue is in the name, surface surveys consider what is on the surface, excavations are what you do when you excavate down into it, while standing building surveys are what archaeologists do standing up, or on ladders, while aerial survey requires being even higher. These are just a few of the modern techniques utilised by modern archaeology, and just as a standing building survey can be frustrated by someone driving a bulldozer, so a surface survey can be frustrated by someone stripping out the more diagnostic artefacts as collectables. On the sites Mr T. mentions, after ploughing, it is the upper levels, the ploughsoil, which will contain the evidence of the later periods (Byzantine, Ottoman, and Medieval Jewish), and surface survey is used all over the Near East

Vignette: I have long ago ceased to believe that Mr Tompa actually believes a word of what he writes as part of his paid lobbying. The guy is a menace to informed debate with his various deliberate misinterpretations and red herring arguments.