Archaeology Editing and Proofreading Services

A context sheet records a layer of dark silty clay with charcoal flecks, 0.15 m thick, sealed by 1042 and cutting 1067. That is what was there. Whether it represents a hearth, a burnt destruction event or redeposited midden material is a different sentence, written by the same person, often in the same paragraph — and once the two are merged, nobody excavating the site again can separate the observation from the interpretation.

We edit what archaeologists write — context and stratigraphic descriptions, excavation reports and their structure, phasing and interpretation sections, specialist report integration, dating evidence and its presentation, grey literature and developer reports, publication monographs and journal articles, archive and deposition documentation, watching brief and evaluation reporting, and public and community-facing accounts of sites. Our editors work on the line between what was observed and what it means.

Keeping description separate from interpretation is the discipline's core discipline, and its failure is a well-written report that cannot be reassessed. Excavation destroys its own evidence, and the record is all that remains. We work through these so the context description states only what was observed — the composition, the colour, the inclusions, the dimensions, the boundaries and the stratigraphic relationships — with the interpretation in a separately marked field or paragraph, since a future researcher must be able to disagree with the interpretation while still trusting the description; so the stratigraphic relationships are stated in the standard terms, because "above" and "sealed by" and "cut by" are different claims and only the last two establish sequence; so the confidence in a relationship is recorded where it was unclear on site, given that a truncated or bioturbated junction is where phasing later goes wrong; so any interpretation that depends on a specialist result still pending is marked as provisional with what would change it; so the dating evidence is presented with what it dates — the context, the deposit's formation or the object's manufacture — as these are routinely conflated and the difference matters; so negative evidence is recorded, since an absence in a well-excavated area is a finding; and so anything not excavated is stated with why. Reports written this way can be reinterpreted in thirty years, which is the only test that matters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished site records, specialist reports and client documentation. We are editors rather than archaeologists, and we offer no view on interpretation, phasing or dating. What we can do is keep the observation recoverable from the interpretation.