It has been a long time since we moved things forward on the Prescot Street project, but the team have been busy in the background and we are now getting ready to present the next stage of our work, The Assessment Report. I have posted an index page and I have also updated our bibliography (which is the first section of the report to be online!). The first ‘real’ section should be the ‘registered finds’ assessment.

I wanted to write a brief journal entry here to explain what the assessment report is all about.

Essentially an assessment report is there to ‘assess’ the results of the excavation. It is an intermediate stage between the excavation and the final analysis of the material. A lot of the basic obligatory work is now out of the way and it is now time to report back (to our client Grange Hotels, to English Heritage and of course to you, too!). In the world of commercial archaeology, this assessment report is sometimes known as a PXA or a MAP2 assessment. The scope of these reports varies widely depending on who is doing the report and which local authority they are working in. However, the general gist remains the same, to assess what has been done and to provide data and analysis of what work is worth doing between now and the end of the project.

We are going to publish our reports in the (mostly) original format, which means that to the non-archaeologist, the language might be a bit technical and may well prove to be tough to read unless you are already up on archaeology and the way it is done commercially in the UK.

In order to get round this, we hope to give regular journal/blog updates to accompany the new reports and provide a slightly simpler way to access the data itself. I am still passionate about putting everything we do onto the website. Hopefully the blog entries will allow us to have the best of both worlds, by allowing us to provide information that is accessible to the non-specialist and at the same time to allow us to provide data to other people working in the field.

I hope that you get something out of the reports!