gosh...isn't it getting better all the time.....not

[BAJR]

GRindle... it's a point of view. ITs a rage against the machine.

Personally I prefer to concentrate that into constructive action. So far so good. Projects I enjoy, initiatives I believe in, a life I can live with. and an anger that is focused and calm.

No need even to kick my cats (though damn they deserve it) even if I am every day presented with problems.. I deal with it.

If after all this time you are taking home 240 a week.. I would wonder if it is worth it? Perhaps its time to get another job and then enjoy archaeology on your own terms.

[Jack]

That also means that the company avoids the pitfalls of employing somebody who may expose the problems of working for a company .

.....but means you get better team-work, more efficient and cohesive excavation and recording. It would be great to work with the same team over and over.............I guess that a vote for permenant staff, wish it was a possible reality. I'll take a find of an alien stargate or a city on mars before archaeology will be valued enough to get enough financial backing.

[Dinosaur]

At the risk of abuse from all directions, there's always the (rather thorny) option of selling off less academically interesting finds to finance future work? Maybe done by a central body with the money used to subsidise research excavations etc? - did anyone see how much glazed medieval floor tiles change hands for with collectors on the Antiques Roadshow Sunday before last? There must be thousands of duplicates sitting around in museum stores....

Alternatively if you want to subsidise a digging career you can win Total Wipeout, congrats to the archaeologist from Northern Ireland (Colin someone) :face-approve:

[BAJR]

Does not find abuse from me... indeed we are creeking under an ever increasing weight of archived 'stuff'.

Let it go... you want to say, while prizing the body sherd out of the researchers hand.

Reminds me of this... friend of mine had to try and deal with it... came up with a sensible sampling strategy... one of each! (should have flogged the rest!) Caledonian Pottery Dig Gallery

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So yeah... why not... we could do with a fund to pay for research and report writing.

[Ken Denham]

Nice idea, but what happens to it in the future?
Let's say someone buys a shed-load of Roman pot who lives in a country/area where there is none or little evidence of Roman occupation/influence. Over the course of time the once treasured Roman pot assemblage gets chucked or lost and along comes some future archaeologist who finds it and hey presto, we have evidence of the Romans being there.
An example of this is a Paleolithic hand axe on show at a museum close to me. It was deposited at the museum some time in the 19th century by an antiquarian and is tagged as being found lying in the open up on the Caldbeck fells. Really, righty ho!
If we could work out some method of marking the stuff so it was obviously "brought in" then I don't see why not.

[BAJR]

http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/253047...chine.html

that would do it for me.

But seriously and returning to the topic that grindle started.

YEs things are not great.. however they are stable. This does not mean things are better than before, it means that things are not getting worse ( part from the normal day to day rough of commercialism) In the past 30 years archaeology has gone from scores of flare wearing beard sporting groovey diggers cruising about and having a damn fine time getting subs and living in tents.. to a couple of thousand field staff, hi viz'd up and trying to be professionals within the development and construction industry... there was going to be a time where expansion bubbles popped. It has happened. The UK digger will have to decide their own path.. rather than have it happen around them.

What do you want... as the contradictions are myriad... to have a lifestyle and job that allows for quirk and eccentricity... but want a job that gives stability and respectability... to want the pay and conditions tht is on a parity with other professions... but are unable to act to make it happen.

Stand up.. Sit down or leave the kitchen.

[Dinosaur]

Once a report's been written Roman pot just becomes 'Heritage Hardcore' - stick it under a road (there are rumours this has happened in the past??), that way we know where it is, it's doing something useful, free storage and it's not contaminating the rest of the archaeological record.

In my experience any nice polished axe gets a b***** great hole drilled through the middle of it by a petrologist, so no mistaking that it's been found before :face-crying:

[GnomeKing]

Dinosaur - -- seek the opinion of museum proffesionals and thier perspective on this issue.

[mpoole]

At the risk of abuse from all directions, there's always the (rather thorny) option of selling off less academically interesting finds to finance future work? Maybe done by a central body with the money used to subsidise research excavations etc? -

If the items don't add to the general knowledge, and have been photographed, documented and the information is stored in a digitally accessible form, then perhaps this approach would help curb the incentive for illegal sales of artifacts. I'd love to own a few beads, and I know that I'm not alone in wanting to hold a bit of history, but I won't buy because there's no way to tell where the items came from, or what they could have told us if they had been properly excavated.

I don't view all artifacts as sacred, but it would be a far better approach to have some sort of information from them before they're disbursed through underground (no pun intended, honest!) channels to people who not only have the interest in artifacts but also the money to buy what they want, including the ability to purchase without any concerns about legalities.

Surely, it would make some of the items seen up for sale elsewhere less attractive, if there were a system put in place to give some certification to the items.

[Dinosaur]

GnomeKing - luckily at the moment it's their problem anyway, our job is merely to dump the stuff on them. I'm sure a lot of landowners would be delighted if the museums got back to them and said 'fancy selling some of this?'. Presently once the archive's been deposited at a museum it ceases to be the archaeological contractor's problem. However, in the interest of field archaeology, any new system would need to see the stuff sold-off before deposition, or we'd just wind up with a lot of richer museums....(not neccessarily a bad thing in the wider scheme of things but not helping us much)