FAME ? we?re going to dig forever?

[BAJR]

http://lettersfromlidongni.blogspot.com/...rever.html

Li Dongni is a Lincoln museum curator, who writes a very good blog.
I enjoyed seeing this view of our archives and storage crisis.

Well worth a read.

On Friday 1st July I spent the day in York, attending a conference organized by FAME (Federation of Archaeological Managers and Employers) and the SMA (Society of Museum Archaeologists) entitled ‘Trouble in Store: facing up to the archaeological archives crisis.’.......

it ends with this..

The main accusation levied against some (I hasten to add ‘but not all’ archaeological contractors is that archives need to be given a higher priority, not considered an expensive and annoying afterthought. The production of the archive is a fundamental element of professional archaeology. Digging the site is only one aspect of the project, and if the products of archaeological investigation are not written up and made available for future scrutiny then, basically, all that is happening is the vandalism of an archaeological site.


So, in conclusion, the day definitely goes down as a success, but as the first step in admitting the problem rather than solving it. The progress of English Heritage’s research will be very interesting to watch, but I hope that every attendee will go away thinking about their own role in the process, and ultimately how they can make the entire process work more smoothly and for the greatest public benefit. Oh, and the day only featured a very small amount of rabbit cuddling…

[Unitof1]

Has a museum ever paid any commercial archaeologist for an archive?

[kevin wooldridge]

Not knocking this conference, but if at the outset someone had stood uo and stated categorically 'the system needs resourcing, the system needs space, the system needs standards' - they could all have been in the Three Legged Mare by 9.15am discussing other more difficult aspects of UK archaeology!!

[P Prentice]

Not knocking this conference, but if at the outset someone had stood uo and stated categorically 'the system needs resourcing, the system needs space, the system needs standards' - they could all have been in the Three Legged Mare by 9.15am discussing other more difficult aspects of UK archaeology!!

the system is clogged up with worthless crap
it aint all valuable and most of it will never be seen again
it needs proper sorting by people who actually use it

[Sith]

One person's 'worthless crap' is anothers tiny but highly significant piece of the jigsaw puzzle. I agree with your last point, but perhaps it should be 'sorted by the people that produced it with those who may need to use it later in mind'. Which is what should be happenning (in line with the various bits of IfA, ICon, MoRPHE etc. guidance on archaeological archives).

[P Prentice]

One person's 'worthless crap' is anothers tiny but highly significant piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

really? have you been inside a repository recently?

and the guidances you cite, apart from being the most borng documents in archaeology and written on a different planet, without regard to the fact that there is nowhere to put this crap

[kevin wooldridge]

With regards to the paper and image archive I think we should consult with the newspaper and media industry, in particular with commercial archives such as some of the picture libraries, and ask how they plan for system/data upgrading and technological redundancy as well as physical space requirements. Surely people who do this for commercial reasons probably have a business model that archaeology could adapt for our slightly more esoteric ends....? As for the material archive, surely it is possible to create depositories based upon the same criteria as used for rating archaeological significance i.e international, national, regional and local considerations that would at least eliminate the need for endless repetition of collecting the same material....

[RedEarth]

This is all well and good and obviously correct but how many museums were actually established with the aim of being repositories for archaeological information so that it might be made available to future researchers. Any? None? Surely most are the result of random Victorian (or earlier) collecting combined with local political ideology and are now basically galleries with stories. What might be more useful would be a series of perhaps regional stores (not places where stuff is put on display) of archaeological material acting as research centres. That way museums (as galleries with stories) could pick the best and probably shinyest items for display in order to get, er, bums through the door, while the rest of the crud is there for archaeologists and other obsessives to look at. This way it could be far more rationalised, museums could be dedicated to what I would say they do best, engaging with the public, and all the material from a particular region could be accessed in one place. At present if you wanted to compare, say, all the medieval pottery from a single region comprising perhaps 3 or 4 counties you might have to visit a dozen museums. The cynical might also say that kindly and noble archaeological contractors hanging onto archives because the museums are full might be convenient for a variety of reasons, not least controlling the data.

[Jack]

Save what you can.

If only those antiquarian diggers had kept the rest of the bones from all those barrows and not just kept the skulls.

What will future archaeologists think of our 'selective' archiving? Are we any better?

[Unitof1]

our 'selective' archiving? Are we any better?

its not about us but rather museums. They don?t want the archive. If they did they would pay for it. If they did pay for it they would have a budget that would target the type and the amount of archive that they wanted to handle. ?we? would then be able to construct our archives accordingly. At the moment a discard policy is mostly a dirty word. people take pictures for no reason and write reports that nobody ever reads.
If you say that museums must take all the archive generated by commercial archaeology then commercial archaeology should also fund the ?whole? museum or rather create museums called museums of archives -redearths [SIZE=2][SIZE=3]regional stores- [/SIZE]produced by commercial archaeology based on the principle that polluter must pay and presumably the polluter must also pay for any subsequent use made of the archive, so for instance any so called academic research should also be funded by the horrid polluters (often the original owners of the archaeology).[/SIZE]