Inconsistent publications

I am making progress.  I have started on a new case study this week and so have been busy accumulating all the publications on this particular site and trying to get a feel for the layout of the site and the nature of the architecture.  This is always really rewarding and I feel like I am making progress, learning something new.  Unfortunately, working with sites that do not yet have their final publications leaves much to be desired.

The problems aren't always immediately obvious.  I wanted to work with this particular site next because I felt like there was a lot of published information and that it would be easier than the other site under consideration.  I was right in that there is a lot of information, but I was sadly sadly wrong that it would be easy.

See, these publications are not at all clear about the labelling of their buildings.  There are two buildings that I am particularly interested in, but I'm having trouble telling them apart.  Publication X has the buildings labelled 1 and 2 in the text but A and B in the photos.  Publication Y has the buildings labelled A and B in the text and photos, but the photo of A in Pub Y is the same as B in Pub X.

Confused yet?  Me too.

So I tentatively assigned the following labels:

1 (from Y) = B (from X)

2 (from Y) = A (from X)

But more problematically, the photos of the details of each building (benches, etc) aren't labelled at all, so I have to guess which building they are from and where they were located in the building.  Oh, and the photo of the same building in two different publications has been flipped left-right, so I don't know which way was East and which was West.

*tears out hair*

I would be tempted to go and dig the site back up myself, but it was flooded 10 years ago by the building of a dam in Turkey.  So no luck.

These are the days that I wonder whether anyone ever reads back over their publications to see if they made sense or if they just throw stuff together without thinking.

Is this where the promise that I will never be *that* kind of academic goes?  Best laid plans. . .