FAME ? we?re going to dig forever?

[Madweasels]

cor blimey - my honourable friends, now.

[BAJR]

luv a duck.... worth knowing though!

You been up the apples and pears... rather than the hills and glens.

However... it does stand that you rant is a good un!

[P Prentice]

...This entire 'crisis' has been caused by our very own industry - .

yep - cant make up our minds what we should keep and why
cant make up our minds who it belongs to anyway
cant make up our minds who should pay, who is responsible or who can see it!!

but at the end of the day it is the responsibility of the contractor/excavator to make sure there is a place to keep it safely for the benefit of the nation before they dig it up - not after - what's difficult about that?

[P Prentice]

Boring or not ....................this is NOT worthless crap !!!!! GET REAL MAN !!!!!!!!!!!!!

ps I mean boring and not borng !

pedantry: stupidity that read a book

[deadlylampshade]

but at the end of the day it is the responsibility of the contractor/excavator to make sure there is a place to keep it safely for the benefit of the nation before they dig it up - not after

Is it?

Are you sure about that?

If there are some "gucci" finds or "high status" objects it seems to me that Museums are quite happy to claim that they belong to them.

If it is yet more post med pottery, med pottery of wading through acres of relatively boring flint then it seems to me that museums lose interest...more like worth versus volume to me.

[Madweasels]

I would agree with Prentice. In a real world where we truly valued the material AFTER it was out of the ground rather than while we are in the course of discovering and identifying it - after which time we have acquired our knowledge and the object etc becomes a storage problem and surplus to OUR requirements - absolutely nothing should be dug up unless there was a pre-arranged place for it to go.

But in response to your comment about museum curators wanting the better stuff - that is because that is the sort of material that better suits their professional goals of presentation and education (as well of course as curation and collections management - but these are skills under pressure these days). We are holistic, curators have always tended to be more selective. It is the way it is - and I do not see why they should change to suit our point of view.

But down in my burrow, I have been doing a bit of thinking. Now then, I would advocate having a system in the future - with the huge pile of dosh that I have just dreamed will come our way - to have the storage, collections management AND access to archaeological material managed from within the archaeological profession itself and NOT transferred to the museum sector at all. A network of storage facilities - not all necessarily to the same standard (still good, but lesser for some types of bulk) but the best at BS5454 - under archaeologists' control. New types of archaeologist would be needed (archaeological collection managers) with the appropriate professional collections management, archiving and documentation training and there would need to be integration with the existing museum store registration system, but there really is no need for our archives to go to museums at all. They seemed the natural place 40 years ago - and morphed into the depositories in the 80s, but rapidly became full (or non-existent) in the 90s (with a passing mention to archiving in PPG16) and now there seems to be the expectation still that archaeological archives should automatically go to museums. Why? Many museums do not even have archaeologists in their staff, let alone enough space. No. Museums and anyone else with a bona fide use of the material will can have the material loaned out to them for fixed, audited periods.

The bedrock of these places then would be proper collections management - full stop. The staff of these stores would not design any outreach projects themselves - anyone and everyone else can do that, the units, museums, local societies. We evaluate, excavate, publish, archive according to the standards we have already established for ourselves (self-reg, and all that) and get rid of a process of deposition into museums. In fact, the museums should be seen to be a user just as anyone else - including local community events etc. Trying to force feed the archives into the museum sector is another of our errors.

There you are - a vision, a bit of 'out-of-the-box' thinking, a paradigm no less - keep museums out of the equation and come up with a network of archaeologist-maintained stores with deposition and access procedures in place. Indeed the Archaeological Archives Forum came up with a document that helps to set one - not a network - of these up: -

Developing an Archaeological Resource Centre Guidance for Sustainable Storage and Access to Museum Collections
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/archives/aaf_a...e_2010.pdf

but even the title still has the phrase 'museum collections' in it, even though it doesn't implicitly state in the document that a museum has to run one of these things. Only that, as I have said, it has accredited status - which might be difficult to arrange of not associated with curators - but we can negotiate that.

Oh, and while we are at it. Archives WILL be deposited in this network of stores (of which I will be ?ber-manager of course) at post-assessment stage, not sometime in the far distant future after publication when the excavator has moved on and when the archive budget has been reduced to half a day of a local work experience kid. Yes, units might complain that it will cost them to retrieve the stuff for publication purposes - but they will save on storage fees and can budget then (in their overhead) for archive access time. And if they went belly up, then the archives would be in proper care (apart from pre-assessment work). Finally, depositing at post-assessment stage will certainly help those planning conditions to be properly and honestly met apart, that is, for the final publication but that element has always be easier to police than archiving. A publication is good for CV, good CDP, good kudos for the unit. By the way, has anyone in BAJR added to their CV the number of sites they have archived into the public domain?

But then all of this is but based unfortunately on my dream of a moolah!

Now I am going to go back into my burrow again.

[P Prentice]

agreed madweasels. the repository should be stated in the wsi and if not, the wsi should not be approved and the planning condition not discharged. the uber repositories will emerge soon enough when planning demands and polluter financing climax together in a free market, roll-over museum kind of inevitability. if you are not already building your uber repository you are already to late

[Unitof1]

[SIZE=3]the title still has the phrase 'museum collections' in it
[/SIZE]

after I come out of the field I really don’t want to see the finds again. What I think should happen is that I send the finds off to the museum, lets call them the finds officer, they process them and get to want them or not (thier discard policy), then they send me the specialist reports (free) which presumably would be written by their pensioned curators who would be interested in undertaking further research using some of the material using the help of "pupils from local and international archaeological babysitting cr?ches. Until this happens I dont see why the museum would "want" the rest of the archive which is mainly "my" appreciation of the context of the finds. Hopefully they would want my archive so much that they pay me for it.

[Marcus Brody]

If your archive is written in the same opaque manner as some of your posts on here, I'd imagine that they'd struggle to make sense of it!}

[kevin wooldridge]

It also seems unlikely to me that any archive would accept the artefacts or ecofacts without some kind of accompanying documentation such as a written and drawn site record.....