First Published: 02/11/2012, 10:49 AM
This is just a quick note in response to a question posted in the comments for the video: Questions of Doom: What is a Context Sheet?
“And now could we please have an explanation of your explanation? To begin with what, exactly, is a context? I think it’s the grid area where you’re digging but positive and negative contexts are a bit more difficult to define, at least for the layman. I assume a positive context would be something like a spoil heap and a negative would be an ancient ditch or other excavation but I’m not completely sure.”
Well, in the context of Archaeology… ho ho… a ‘context’ is a discernible, discreet, element of a site.
Almost all historical sites have been formed by multiple events and occupation layers. These can be broken down into units of formation activity and thus placed into a chronology to establish the order in which those events occurred. Each unit, each event, is a context.
The digging of a ditch or pit is a context; the fill of that ditch is another. The fill could be a burial; it could be multiple filling events resulting in multiple contexts. Building a wall would form a context and the collapse of the roof onto the floor would be yet another. So forth and so on.
Natural depositional events, for example silt laid down by flood also results in a new context.
A spoil heap, i.e. deposited by an Archaeologist, is not a context.
Contexts can be referred to as positive or negative depending on their effect on the formation of the archaeological record. A positive context adds material to the site whereas a negative context removes material from the site or from one place to another (for example digging a ditch and using the fill to make a bank).
While a context can be located on a site using the grid square system, it is not related to that system. In the same way: A grid square system is useful for locating features on a map but it doesn’t dictate where those features are, what they’re called or how they were formed. For example, a forest may haphazardly occupy varying portions of many grid squares, it bears no relationship to those neat units of space. The grid system is merely a way to easily refer to portions of an excavation – before anything is identified or excavated!
Hopefully this is a useful note?
Cheers,
Marc (Mr Soup).
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