Aspects of Archaeology: Palimpsest

[@tctheunbeliever]

Nice work on an important concept. The main thing about the literal "palimpsest" I recall learning in history class is that old documents were often completely scraped off and the parchment re-used simply because of the expense, and that we've discovered complete documents written over--the medieval Church is frequently implicated for replacing valuable (nowadays, at the least) historical sources with scripture, liturgy, etc. This is the most common literal usage of the word that I usually see.

[@andiebyrnes6117]

I managed, yesterday, to give probably the world's worst description of an archaeological palimpsest to a non-archaeological friend who made the mistake of expressing an interest in my current research activities. So today I thought it worth looking around the web for a rather better approach than than the car wreck that I had offered up. Thanks, Archaeosoup people, for giving me some rather better explanatory tools than the ones I was employing yesterday :-)