5          Sharing geotechnical archives – How should we make data available and why ?

 

Getting better archaeological data from geotechnical records is one thing – making it available is another.

 

Archaeologists are often given copies of geotechnical reports from the sites on which they work but really want to know what has been found on adjacent sites. Our investigation found that, for this reason, archaeologists want geotechnical data to be accumulated into archives that they can access.

 

Some archives already exists within engineering companies and, nationally, at the BGS, but the former are not normally accessible to other contractors and the latter, though extensive, are incomplete. Most geotechnical data is widely dispersed among those geotechnical contractors who create it and the clients for whom it was gathered.

 

This lack of available records limits what archaeologists can understand of their sites and the landscapes around them.

 

There are a number of practical and commercial reasons why records aren’t accumulated into public archives. It is not at all clear that these can be overcome – since geotechnical engineers have, themselves, been trying to do this for so long and because the constraints are serious.

 

But, whatever the concerns, such sharing of data, through some sort of archiving, must surely be good professional practice if it allows us to better understand buried deposits  - the very heart of our work whether as archaeologists and engineers – and perhaps it will be worth our while at least exploring how archaeologists can encourage it to happen

 

One solution could be for the archaeological brief to require that all geotechnical logs are deposited, in digital form, in a public archive such as that held by BGS. 

 

This would make it possible for geotechnical data to be incorporated into developing a deposit model of each area and to be made available, with some necessary restrictions, for others to consult.

 

 Planners would then also have a much stronger, rational basis on which to plan for archaeological conservation and develop 3-dimensional models of archaeological deposits and archaeologists would have a much better idea of how to investigate and interpret sites.

 

BGS has started to create similar models of superficial made ground deposits in some key areas as part of its wider efforts to move to 3-dimensional geological modelling. They have produced, for example, an example for Manchester showing the changes to a river course brought about by excavation of the Ship Canal. 

 

There is an argument that such archives should be local to each county or town, rather than national, to make the best use of local knowledge and networks – especially the invaluable expertise of local geotechnical teams and engineers. The disadvantage of this is that the same network of contacts which makes local archiving successful – where the contacts are good – can cause it to fail where such contacts are poor. Local archiving standards can also be poor, for lack of resources and because there is a tendency for local variations in practice to develop which makes it harder to integrate information nationally.

 

For these reasons we favour a national geotechnical archiving effort based around the BGS archives, although we see no reason why records should not be passed down to the local Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) or the Urban Archaeological Database (UAD) as well – allowing BGS to guarantee data quality while enabling local authority access in coordination with BGSs own local and site-specific role. It is clearly essential, however, that every incentive is provided to encourage geotechnical and archaeological record deposition and every possible barrier removed. For this reason, in particular, it is essential that we consider how the costs of archiving are to be met if charging has, as we suspect, proved a significant disincentive for deposition in some archaeological archives (such as the ADS).