Week 9: Documentation as craft

Writing the archaeological report — treating documentation as part of the recovery, not an afterthought once it's done

3 May 2027

An archaeological report is judged on whether a reader who never saw the artifact can tell what was found, how, and how confident to be about it. This week is about writing that report as you go rather than reconstructing it from memory afterwards: what to log the moment something works (or doesn’t), what evidence to keep even if it looks irrelevant at the time, and how to write about a dead end without it reading as a confession of failure.

The same structure applies whether your artifact ends up fully playable, partially recovered, or provably unrecoverable — the difference is in the findings, not the shape of the report.

Outline#

• logging as you go, not reconstructing afterwards
• evidence worth keeping: screenshots, hex dumps, dead ends and all
• writing a failed step so it reads as a finding, not an apology
• what your studio notes need to contain by week 11