Radio 4 item on lack of archaeologists

[Dinosaur]

I'm often misunderstood, but always well-meaning :face-angel:

.....ok, maybe not }

[BAJR]

cough.... its why we love you .

a conundrum wrapped in a mystery and with a heart of gold :face-kiss:

[Dinosaur]

Just for that, might buy a tool off you this weekend, so you'll only need to do 74 hours this week....ok, ok, so maybe I was intending to anyway....:face-kiss:

This thread has gone far too polite and huggy :0

:face-topic:

[Jack]

Vomit bags on standby

[ZSilvia]

Does no one else take the, perhaps cynical and paranoid, view that I do about this?

Essentially the government saying 'look, you've had a good run but now you're too much of a financial burden to economic growth so most of you will have to sod off. It's OK though, we've put all this money into HLF so there will be an army of trained volunteers to take up the slack'. Note the words of the government chap, not 'it's terrible that all these skilled professions, many graduates, are losing their jobs', rather 'well there are plenty of volunteers'. It's the Fens all over again, but by stealth! I know what I partly blame, and it isn't the media's misconceptions about how it all works, it's the very HLF sponsored community projects that we all love, sorry. I'm sure I've said it before but it has for some time seemed easier for volunteers on community projects to get training in fieldwork skills than for employed professionals or undergraduates (or equivalent), which just isn't right. Is it any wonder this situation is now arising?

Who is Mary Beard by the way?

I think you nailed it. I found this BBC report terribly offensive, especially when John Penrose hits the screen saying volunteer archaeology is healthy and encouraged. I don't disagree that volunteer work is indeed a great service, but this report presents archaeology as a discipline that anyone can just jump into and join the fun. A national archaeology service run by volunteers means a significant brain drain and a decline in effective practice. It would be a burden in the long run if inexperienced volunteers were the majority because the service would be inefficiently run as those volunteers essentially need to "learn up" the skills most of us skilled workers already have done through experience. They'd then realize they should be getting paid for their efficiency, knowledge, and wisdom, demand pay, then run off when that didn't happen. Then we are back to square one. But what is worse, is that this plays completely into the hands of modern, post-Fordist free market principles, which seeks to drive down labor costs to a minimum while ignoring the very concept of skilled work altogether. They'd run a whole society on "volunteers" if they could, in fact thats why all manufacturing comes from China. Even more disgusting is that Conservatives can and will claim this a victory of the Big Society, i.e. society picks up the pieces and works for free because the government couldn't care enough to run things themselves. This very notion of an industry run on volunteers will prove to bite them real hard in the long run, because all they are doing is resetting the clock on an otherwise efficient public service.

Eh, but we're all just pissing into the wind here aren't we...to quote the greatest post I've seen on this board "What Would Colin Renfrew Do?"