Cemeteries often remain in use over many generations, and may represent several hundred or even thousands of years of burial tradition. Some cemeteries in cities contain tens of thousands of burials. With many graves inter-cutting each other, patterns of stratigraphic relationships can be quite complicated. The cemetery ground might be envisaged as a 3-dimensional stratigraphic structure of some complexity. But while it is common to see plans of the spatial layout of graves on a horizontal plane, it is actually quite rare to see good profiles or cross-sections through cemetery ground showing the vertical stratigraphy. With modern recording techniques and computer analysis, it should be possible to generate such cross-sections from data gathered during excavation. If anyone can point to good examples, that would be much appreciated!
May be worth asking MOLA again as I seem to recall they 3d-ed in all the graves for Crossrail at Liverpool Street/Bedlam. Or potentially now for HS2 they (MOLA-Headland) did SfM/photogrammetry.
Indeed never have had to draw a section/profile of a grave that I excavated other than sketches on the back of context sheets. On jobs where graves were in section and we could not remove we did do small ones though - e.g. remember doing that for charnel pit and single grave in section once at the base of the Monument.
In some regions, especially in Saxonia, the modern coal mining has caused older settlements to "dissapear". But before the planned evacuation, archaeological investigations have been done.
Perhaps Harald Stäuble fro m the Archaeological Heritage Office in Saxonia can help and give clues...i cant mention him here, but he is on researchgate activ.
Hi! I have some examples of grave vertical stratigraphy performed with modern recording techniques. I hope these help.