such equipment and the cost
of training to use it will only be affordable by large institutions and
commercial contractors.
The longer term future of survey devices seems to lie in
the direction of laser scanning equipment, which scans the entire
surface of a building (or indeed of a landscape) and establishes the 3
dimensional coordinates of as many points on that surface as may be
required by the researcher. The resulting "point cloud" is
then stored in a computer and may be used to plot features or cross
sections, with elements added from other, conventional survey sources,
as required.
22. WHAT TO DO WITH THE COMPLETED ASSESSMENTS AND SURVEYS
It is obviously desirable to preserve the results of
building research of any sort, so that it does not have to be repeated
and so that in the event of a building being destroyed (which still
happens regrettably often), something is saved for future generations to
see and learn from. Deposition of a copy in a public library is a good
first step, though the long term future of local public libraries looks
uncertain. Part V of Morriss’s Archaeology of Buildings (Annex
3 Book 26) has some good advice.
The classic advice is that surveys should be published and
certainly there is nowadays a range of journals published annually at
national level which specialise in buildings and related studies of
particular periods, such as Britannia, Medieval Archaeology and
Vernacular Archaeology, to mention only three of many. There is also our
county journal, Archaeologia Cantiana. Whether these journals would be
able to cope with a flood of surveys of minor and in many cases similar,
buildings if such were to be produced, remains to be seen. If the
surveys proved to be of varying quality, or uncertain interpretation,
editors might well become somewhat selective in what they would agree to
publish.
One alternative is to publish surveys as local monographs,
which has become an increasingly easy task with modern "desk-top
publishing" software for home computers. Another alternative is to
publish them on the internet, though at the present date, this does seem
a somewhat impermanent medium of record. As time goes on, other, better
means of publishing building surveys may appear. We sincerely hope that
any present uncertainty in preservation of the record will not
discourage the very valuable activity of historical assessment and
survey of historic buildings.
____________________________________________________________________________
Roger A C Cockett
for the Historic Buildings Committee
of the Kent Archaeological Society
Candlemas 2008
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