Although this layer made excavation very difficult, it preserved Herculaneum and prevented tampering and looting.
Immobilization of contaminants in situ is an attractive option at many sites because the vast quantities of affected media, often with low pollutant concentrations, make excavation or extraction of the contamination infeasible.
"It's as much about the shattered dreams of a company like Atari," said Jonathan Chinn of Lightbox Entertainment, the production company making the excavation documentary, at the SXSW festival this year.
Thus if a contractor is making an excavation that produces large amounts of dust and this dust causes loss to neighbouring property, the contractor's liability policy would respond to claims for loss, even though the act that produced the dust was a deliberate act.
As all the talking heads in the film made clear, a more accurate description of Petrie would be the man who pioneered the techniques of modern archaeology by making sure excavations were conducted in an orderly manner, that finds weren't ransacked or looted and everything was meticulously recorded.
Nevertheless, the bad publicity made further excavation impossible last summer.
Since then, greater protection of lands has been put in place so that changes in use, including destruction, cannot be made without excavation first.
The American School of Oriental Research, which made the excavation together with the Jordanian authorities, sold it with 80 pieces of architecture and sculpture from the site in 1939 to the Cincinnati Art Museum for $5,000.
The shape of the barbet's bill, which is not at all chisel-tipped like that of a woodpecker, makes the excavation of cavities in trees a task requiring great effort, and it appears that only dead, well-rotted trees are used.
Atkinson made "minimal" excavation records, and no report of it was published until Whittle and Wysocki's detailed report in 1998.
These traces do not represent tool marks made during excavation, because tools could not penetrate deeply into the fossil without shattering the brittle bone.
