If anyone has been following the Britarch antics....

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadm...L=britarch

see At best to be professional one has to where safety equipment
also archaeology cymru website and Consultation on Liberal Party Heritage policy

plus a few others.

I am truely concerned about the next statement...

There is no question about it, my unit supplies all the equipment, transport, plus safety helmet, hivis jacket and toe capped boots.

If any unit manager questions my units policy they shouldn't be undertaking professional work on any level either.

For archaeological work on ALL occasions we where safety equipment, even when the excavation levels are slight, it looks professional. I am sick to the back teeth as archaeologists looking like tramps, after all a solicitor wouldn't be seen dead at work not wearing a suit.

Archaeologists have to look professional, such as wearing a hardhat or not, if you work for me and you don't wear safety equipment after 3 warnings your suspended on appeal. That is written into a signed contract.

The individual recently we suspended had not signed any contract so they were luckily for them treated as if them had signed a contract. If I had my way they would have been suspended.

As for unions, I wouldn't employ anyone who was a member of a union, socialist institutions fit for the waste bin.

Karl-James Langford PGDipAH, PIFA


If anyone knows this individual or you are that individual please contact me offlist on either 01620 861643 or info@bajr.org

Remembering my own AUP I would appreciate that people answer this one carefully.... but I would like to know more.



Another day another WSI?

The editor of the digger is a Marxist/Trotskyite member of the SWP and as such represents a tiny section of the archarchaeological comunity. Should this political extemist be replaced as the voice of British archaeological community in favour of somebody who represents a more mainstream opinion?

check out the October letters page of the Digger, should the advocation of the burning down of institutional buildings be allowed or should this lunatic be removed from the editorship of a national archaeological journal?

Hi Host, how did the meeting with Tim Howard of IFA go?

Cold aint it! just seen a coupla brass monkeys crying their eyes out! Anyways a weather question! Is it me or does working in the rain and indeed snow just because the project is running out of time justify wreaking an archaeological site.

All of us are familiar with the experience of looking at each other in the rain and our looks say it all " surely he`s gona rain us off" no chance!

And that wonderful site thats been cleaned is knackered with muddy footprints and then you spend another week (if the rains cleared) cleaning the site again hence wasting more time, so is it justifiable.

I know a lot of "the more important site" get the shelter but its usually not the entire site.

Another bone of contention is the feeling guilty about being in the site hut when it is bad weather and a sign of your comitment (or stupidity) is to be seen working in the rain. Many a time I have seen workmen laughing their bits of as we continue to work and they have been rained off. A coupla corking examples Ive worked on are Cambourne in Cambridge (when it rained for a year!) and Stanstead that had site hut conditions worse than any WW1 trench. Also workmen get decent rain proof clothing, you know the light weight stuff while we get the boil in a bag fishermans friend yellow sowester styly that rips to a thousand shreds as soon as you bend down. Also the workmen guys tend to get wet pay for working in adverse conditions, try that one at the Unit!

Bit annoyed this morning as I have just discovered my blog site provider is getting out of the 'free access' business.

Whilst in the process of setting up a new blog site, it occurred to me that there must be a lot of archaeological blogs out there...but if so they seem hard to find. Have found a couple of quite boring US blogs, but only Dave Beard's 'Archaeology In Europe' blog on this side of the Atlantic. Does anyone know of any sites?

I am willing to add hyperlinks via my new blog when it gets going...

Could be a new BAJR access resource maybe?

.

Someone at work today told me that it is possible for anyone under the age of 25, who is a recent archaeology graduate, to gain EU funding to teach archaeological excavation techniques to students in EU countries. Does anyone know who to contact regarding this? I've just tried searching on google and can't find anything about it.

Thanks.

Many of those titles apply in many units, but the don't always mean the same thing.

I got a big boost in my career when I applied for a job in Scotland as a 'Supervisor' only to find at the interview that it meant something like 'Excavation Director', which would not have been the case in England. I got the job, and luckily it turned out I was able to do it...

Jobs advertised simply as 'Archaeologist', or even 'Assistant Archaeologist', will mean something completely different (often at a higher level of skill and responsibility) if they are in a consultancy firm or a public body like the Environment Agency rather than a unit.

1man1desk

to let, fully furnished

Work with less supervision?
Work more effectively and efficiently?
Write more sarcastic comments on context sheets?
Take more and longer fag breaks while they recount tales of the good old days to the newer staff?
Spend more time saying "That's not how we did it at my old unit, so your procedures are crap."

In theory they should be able to take more responsibility, but I am not sure how the IFA could recognise this given their structuring system for the levels. If you were to say that experience should be taken into account when determining the level at which someone may join the IFA, the process would become too heavily reliant upon references because there would be little that was demonstrable in their background apart from the actual amount of time they have spent working in archaeology. This is not always a useful measure of competence. I think that medals are definitely the way forward.

Cheers,
Eggbasket
Gentleman Adventurer and Antique

"All human endeavour is futile"

I have had a number of requests to reprint my table of advertised archaeological wages. I am happy to do this and for ease of access I have placed it on a blog-site at http://www.freewebs.com/outwageuk.

Click onto the Nov2005 link.