FINDING ANYTHING INTERESTING?

Robert Brian Rahn

Working in archaeology requires a fine eye for detail…literally. The raw materials of archaeological
study, the artefacts, materials and stratigraphy revealed by excavation, require the excavator to be
alert to a variety of small and subtle changes or inclusions in the soil, and reliably pick these out
under less than ideal working conditions. Teaching archaeology students to excavate effectively
generally involves taking a group of students to a dig, placing them in a variety of pits, and telling
them to ‘call us if you see anything out of the ordinary’. This is both extremely confusing for the
students, and an extremely accurate description of exactly how archaeologists operate!

This brings me to what I want to propose today. In practice it’s impossible to pick up everything out
of the ordinary for later identification. It’s theoretically possible, but the cost in time, effort and
money makes it completely impractical. This is even more true because the majority of things ‘out of
the ordinary’ are not of any archaeological interest. You only need watch a working archaeologist to
see how many objects are picked up and then rejected as unimportant compared to how many end
up in a plastic bag to go back to the lab. Picking all of these up without that critical step would
multiply the post-excavation workload by tenfold. Developing this ability to identify and select the
important from the inconsequential is at the core of the practical side of archaeology training, even
if its rarely directly stated.

At the same time, the size of this ‘basic’ skillset of knowledge and competencies is very, very large. If
we consider just the generic classes of objects an archaeologist might encounter, we have:
- Ceramics
- Animal bone
- Human bone
- Metal artefacts
- Glass
- Charcoal
- Stone tools
- Pollen
- Basketry, cloth, leather goods, wooden objects, etc. etc. etc.

Each of these classes of find will need to be analysed for the final report, requiring the services of a
specialist to go over each class of finds separately. In fact, the amount of knowledge involved
outstrips the amount of time available in an undergraduate degree’s three years. It’s simply not
possible to teach someone how to reliably identify, excavate, conserve, process and interpret the full
spectrum of archaeological deposits without extensive on-the-job training. This means time spent
digging under the supervision of others, and yet starting commercial archaeologists often find
themselves thrust alone onto a building site to conduct a watching brief without recourse to
supervision except what they can get by phoning someone more experienced.

In practice, field and lab archaeologists cope by specialising: I’m very good with animal bone, but
inexperienced with human bone and hopeless with pottery (besides just identifying it as such). But
even having specialists on site doesn’t guarantee mistakes don’t get made: I worked on one site
where an excavator found what they thought was the skeleton of a rabbit that burrowed into the
site and died. They threw the rabbit on the spoil heap, and just happened to mention it during break
to the site animal bone expert, who asked to see it. On finding the ‘rabbit’, the bone expert
exclaimed ‘This is a baby’. It was the skeleton of a human infant buried on the site. The very
experienced excavator didn’t know much about bones, so couldn’t make that identification, and
even if I’d taken a look I’m not sure I’d have recognised the unique shape of a human infant
skeleton.
The specialists examining each class of find have a parallel problem: The majority of finds, once
broadly classified (ceramic, flint, glass, bone) will be quickly and easily identified, leaving a small
group of ‘out of the ordinaries’ that the specialist will have to spend extra time thinking about and
figuring out. The problem is that performing all those ‘quick and easy’ identifications actually takes a
huge amount of time and effort on the part of the specialist, as each needs to be inspected
separately. This is because the sheer number of finds from a typical site may run far into the
thousands or even hundreds of thousands in the case of environmental finds (bones, pollen, etc.).
This leaves the specialist spending most of their time doing very basic identifications, where their
skills would be better suited to focusing on the exceptional, ‘out of the ordinary’ finds.

Put simply, the working archaeologist:

- Can’t acquire all of these experiences and skills prior to finishing their undergraduate
degree and starting work
- Can acquire them only at the expense of long hours of study of a specialist topic
- Won’t need the majority of this knowledge with the regularity needed to retain it.
Additionally, the specialists:
- Spend large amounts of their time doing very basic analysis/identifications, not making full
use of the skillset they have developed.

What would help is a way of holding all this esoteric, technical knowledge centrally and distributing
it to the archaeological worker as needed, and most importantly, with limited delay. This would let
the fieldworker delegate the responsibility of gaining and maintaining these knowledge skills, and
focus on developing their technical skills at excavation and recording of sites as well as

This sounds like a job for an EXPERT SYSTEM!

The situation I’ve just described fits all the positives of expert systems: an organisation with a high
level of know-how experience and expertise that can’t be easily transferred to all its members. The
usual example is that of medical professionals: Your GP is essentially doing the same job as the
archaeological fieldworker—assessing a situation and making an informed decision about how to
proceed. One way that assessment and decision on how to proceed can be made is to consult a
diagnostic expert system that suggests potential causes for a given set of symptoms.

The same setup could be implemented in archaeology. The fieldworker could have access to an
expert system for performing field classification of artefacts, focusing on the ‘this is an artefact, keep
it / this is a naturally-occurring object, throw it away’ decision. Then, rather than referring special
cases to an ad hoc network of expertise, a common expert system could be consulted, either via
Internet connection in the office, or even over a web-enabled phone, to perform field identifications
of finds or features, reducing the risk that infant skeletons wind up on the spoil heap!

In the case of the specialist, an expert system could take over the repetitive duties of performing
basic identification and quantification of a class of finds. Given that basic identification is usually a
matter of visually inspecting the finds, an automatic scanning system could be developed to
recognise the typical visual appearance of common finds. The most important feature of such a
system would be to flag not only all ‘unknown’ results but also all ‘uncertain’ results for the specialist
to revisit. Given how the vast majority of specialist time is spent on basic identification, even a 50%
success rate from the computer would result in nearly halving the overall time spent by the specialist
analysing and reporting findings.

Would all this be beneficial to archaeology? As it currently is practiced, archaeology is a low-paid and
labour-intensive profession despite the high bar to entry in terms of training and education: it’s been
speculated that archaeology is the lowest-paid graduate profession in the UK. This is due at least in
part to the time-consuming process of excavation and analysis. The reports produced by commercial
archaeological units are often criticised for doing the bare minimum of justice to the archaeological
record. This is not generally due to ill-will on the part of the commercial units, but rather the conflict
between competitive tendering for contracts and the time requirements of producing an exhaustive
site report. Introducing expert systems to aid diagnosis would free up excavators to concentrate on
improving their technical excavation skills and specialists to perform more sophisticated analyses.
With more time for careful excavation and less time taken in post-excavation, units could produce
more sophisticated reports, increasing their status within the wider archaeological community and
justifying better wages for their employees. Part-automating what are currently the most labour-
intensive portions of the excavation process will reduce that labour/time requirement, allowing
units to take on more work while paying higher hourly wages to their workers.