The Archaeological Artifice

I have touched on the matter of the "archaeological artifice" before -- and have been thinking about this again today.  It all came back into my mind when I was sorting out some photos to do with Rhosyfelin.

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/how-to-manufacture-neolithic-quarry.html

How many ordinary people are aware that when archaeologists, with infinite care, use their little trowels to scrape away fine sediments and leave behind the big bits, they are creating something which can become a pretty vast distortion of reality?  I hope the archaeologists are themselves aware of this danger.........

When you look at the above photo, it's easy for a gullible member of the public to think:  "My goodness!  That looks just like a quarry -- look at the quarried face and all those bits that the quarrymen have removed, just lying there in a big pile, waiting to be sorted out and taken away....."

Actually there never was a natural rock face that looked like this, and this scene never existed in the real world.  When the site was first excavated, there were trees and shrubs everywhere, and a proper mess that the archaeologists, in their wisdom, decided to "tidy up."  This is what it all actually looked like when some of the shrubs had been removed to give access to the accumulated material:

One has to admire the meticulous and fastidious fashion in which the "rubbish" has been removed, leaving only the "significant" stones to be photographed and mapped using the best techniques available.  But the assumption seems to be that the debris is inconvenient and has to be got rid of, and that the bigger stones are important enough to remain in place so as to be examined.  To the right of the top photo, off the picture, there is a huge mound made of all the excavated material........ out of sight and out of mind.

Is there an assumption that the big and convenient stones got there first, as a result of quarrying activities, and that the finer "inconvenient" material then somehow came along later on, covering it all over and filling in all the gaps?

I have also been worried by the "surfaces" which have been spoken of at various stages of the Rhosyfelin dig.  Now in a sequence of sediments surfaces can and do exist, where a soft black layer for example gives way to a hard red layer.  Archaeologists often stop scraping when they get down to a junction, and by stripping away everything above it, they can reveal what might at one time have been the ground surface.  But there is also a great danger that a surface can be invented or created, with archaeologists saying "Ah, in our wisdom we deem there to be some sort of change going on here in the sediment sequence, and we therefore deem it to be a surface."  In the real world, extensive surfaces do not all get covered by newer deposits simultaneously -- bits and pieces may be covered by sedimentation today, leaving other bits exposed until they are covered by some rockfall or other event in maybe hundreds or thousands of years' time.

Sorry guys, but the sequence of events in the real world are much more complex than you like to imagine.  There have been natural slope processes, rockfalls, accumulation events, degradation events, and interference from vegetation here on this site for maybe 20,000 years, and nice photos of a "manufactured quarry", and meticulously drawn plans and diagrams (which we will no doubt soon see in print) do not alter that fact.