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| World does not end with the White Cliffs |
Expanding on the Syrian lamp laundered through the PAS
discussed on his blog, David Knell added the following to his original post:
The difficulty here seems to be that the identification of the object
was an unwarranted assumption, guided by the narrow confines of what
would be expected within a supposed British context and tailoring
it to fit, rather than accepting that the discovery of the object was
very different to that of a documented excavation and that the object
could not safely be treated in the same way. Familiarity with a much
wider international typology than that of Wheeler's localised (and long outdated!) 'London in Roman Times'
was called for. The episode highlights the importance of recognising
that PAS recording is not a substitute for traditional archaeology..
And that the world or archaeology extends beyond the confines of the shores of Albion. British archaeology's adoption of the PAS as a means of dealing with the destruction of teh archaeological record through collection-driven exploitation of the archaeological record was always a bit at odds with the overall approach to 'Raubgrabung' and tombaroli in Europe generally but that is no excuse for them to totally isolate themselves from the rest of Europe in everything.
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