Archaeology and excavation

One noun on this list leads two lives, and a reader who knows only the first will misread every excavation report. In ordinary German die Ansprache is a speech — the mayor’s words at an opening — or the way somebody is spoken to, as in die persönliche Ansprache. On a dig it is the identification of a find or a feature: the statement of what the thing in the ground is. Die Ansprache der Verfärbung als Pfostengrube is nobody making a speech to a stain in the soil; it is the decision that the dark patch once held a post. The verb splits the same way, eine Scherbe als römisch ansprechen, and hunters use it for making out an animal before the shot. On site the second sense is the one that carries weight, because every plan, date and interpretation is built on how a feature was first identified, and a mistaken Ansprache travels quietly into all of them.