Nearly ?3m of taxpayers cash spent on Anglesey archaeological dig

[Dinosaur]

which kinda suggests that the planning permission was made before any evaluation.....

of course a local unit is more likely to get a jobs in there local area its not down to money grabbing conspiracy it probably down to them having local staff and resources so they don't have to pay for accommodation and travel, and whole range of other other thing which can make there quote cheaper. Strangely i've never worked of a Welsh based unit in London or Scotland

Is intrusive evaluation actually required before making a planning decision? I've worked on plenty of jobs over the years which hadn't been trial trenched (and plenty more where the trial trenches had given completely unhelpful results or destroyed all the important relationships, but that's another story....)

Some large development companies these days have stuff in their environmental policies about using local subcontractors wherever possible to reduce carbon-footprints etc.

Although based in NE England, the crew I work for have occasionally been known to do jobs as far north as the Orkneys, as far south as Somerset, East Anglia, yes Wales, wherever - but the logistics and costs do tend to go through the roof, and there are 'hidden' things like a manager having to go out to deal with stuff suddenly becomes a 2 day exercise with overnight stays and travel costs rather than just getting up early, do the meeting and back in the office by lunchtime to deal with other stuff. And shifting a few hundred soil samples suddenly becomes a major issue.....

And a lot of developers do value 'local knowledge', as do many consultants who I'm sure are quite good at 'guiding' their clients through the process of putting out tenders for archaeological fieldwork. Plus some developers (doubtless advised by their consultants) are savvy enough to realise that curators will give them a smoother ride if they think the work is being done by what they consider to be a 'safe pair of hands' whose work they know. And at a fieldwork level things tend to go much more smoothly if the archaeologist(s) on site can have a crack-on with the construction guys, know the same pubs/football teams/whatever - maintaining a good relationship like that increases the chances of being remembered the next time a job comes up

[Unitof1]

pensions will be mensioned mcduff

Drunky I will try and get to the media bashing archaeology bit but first don?t be mislead by others on bajr by my apparent obsession about pensions. For a long time bajr harped on about pay scales but never mentioned pensions. Pensions are pure profit but profit is a word detested in archaeology especially by all the lefty leaning artists who populate the subject but are almost to a person sitting on pension rights that they expect our children to pay for and who insist that the government borrow vast amounts of money from the banks to pay for or ensure that we have untenable growth in the economy to pay for it. Example from holyhead from the 60/70s to follow.

Now the biggest pension grabbers are the civil servants. It goes all the way back to the romans and probably beyond. Theres a good chance that a lot of britains landscape is still aligned with the roman cadastral tax farming tithes and ?land? taxes system. The civil servants cant help themselves. They are convinced that we are all here to pay their ?..and there are two types of civil servants-those that do archaeology and those that don?t. I am another type of archaeologist and that is one that is not a civil servant.

What your job at wales and at fenland district have in common apart from media bashing is that they are civil service jobs and by that I mean that is that ?they? owned the land and they wanted to develop it. That?s got to be a murky position especially for a civil servant archaeologist. Hasn?t it. Now civil service landownership is a very murky business. Ex grammer schools might have had trusts and governors who ?owned the site before it become whatever it is now.A bit of welsh ownership murkyness seems to be that 113 acres (51.40ha) of land at Ty Mawr, near Holyhead, was once owned by an aluminium factory, Anglesey Aluminium and one that needed a nuclear power station to run it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglesey_Aluminium

One tonne of aluminium requires the same amount of electricity that an average family uses in 20 years, so free power is needed

Don?t worry about the closing of the aluminium factory in Holyhead we have another one here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcan_Lynemouth_Aluminium_Smelter

seems to have been a stinky place and they bought up all the land about it
Why the aluminium factory owned the holyhead land might be for similar reasons. WDA purchased 113 acres (51.40ha) of land at Ty Mawr, near Holyhead, from Anglesey Aluminium but I wonder if the site was part of this cuddly sale in 1969 http://www.kehoecountryside.com/penrhos-history.html

Then the nice aluminium people decide to sell the land and very nice welsh government agency falls over its self to buy it somewhen about 2005-6 a few years before the most important employer of all people in north wales does a bunk.

Now Dunky say that the evaluations were done before this. As a commercial archaeologists this would be the best case profit scenario because what you would say to the buyer is do an evaluation, establish how much the archaeology should cost to excavate and then get a clause in the sale contract that says that the seller ?the aluminium factory people will pay for the archaeology.

Is that what happened?

And See how Dino is plying false humility about the job with the poor little gravel company and its mineral rights.

[SIZE=3]new faces along the way have seen sense so a rather more sensible approach to the archaeology has been taken on all sides, with the client following recommendations from the curator as things go along - since all sides are being willing it all seems to work ok. However, with the usual amount of horse-trading etc I can't imagine any significant profit margins are happening on any side, all the budgets are pared to the bone with all the usual continual cost-trimming [and I can see the client's point, there's sweet f a profit on a ton of gravel at the moment, so they really don't want to spend more on archaeology than absolutely necessary]

[/SIZE]

Hes almost got my heart welling with admiration for how they all solider on without an evaluation. Its not owned by rio tinto by any chance?

[P Prentice]

....don’t be mislead by my obsession about pensions....... Pensions are pure profit but profit is a word detested in archaeology by all the lefty leaning artists .......are almost to a person sitting on pension rights that they expect our children to pay for and who insist that the government borrow vast amounts of money from the banks to pay for or ensure that we have untenable growth in the economy to pay for it. ...... the biggest pension grabbers are the civil servants. .....civil servants cant help themselves. They are convinced that we are all here to pay their....... Its not owned by rio tinto

ah slothrop - where to start?

civil servants are bagdads all right, them and nurses and firemen and dustmen and road sweepers stealing our childrens inheritance. what about them other fatcat privateer shop keepers and milkmen with their private pensions wot they pay for by charging us more, forcing us to raid our childrens piggy banks

i'm with you - lets say no to pensions, lets stop working and starve to death - unless we happen to have fleeced a few liloldladies in our time!

[Marcus Brody]

Unit, WTF are you on, and where can I get some?

[Unitof1]

does anybody know how much the welsh development agency paid for the site six or seven years ago?

civil servants are bagdads all right, them and nurses and firemen and dustmen and road sweepers stealing our childrens inheritance. what about them other fatcat privateer shop keepers and milkmen with their private pensions wot they pay for by charging us more, forcing us to raid our childrens piggy banks

they didnt steal them- they were promised them by other civil servants with even bigger pensions. Thing is should you accept stolen goods? This includes tax relief that the fatcat shop keepers are encouraged into. Its not about robbing childrens piggy banks its about morgaging thier adult lifes

[Marcus Brody]

Maybe we could have a separate thread titled something like 'Unitof1 Vs. The Pension Grabbers' where all this sort of thing could be discussed, rather than it choking off every other thread like Japanese Knotweed.

[Dinosaur]

Its not owned by rio tinto by any chance?[/SIZE][/FONT]

No idea, seems to change almost weekly

Hasn't Unit made any provision for his old age?

[Unitof1]

yes its just like knotweed

I'm also beginning to wonder whether recent stories of this type may be part of a larger trend to try to discredit archaeology. However, if the aim is to show that archaeology is holding back development, this is perhaps not the best site to use as an example. The presence of archaeology on the site demonstrably didn't stop the development, and it's not being suggested that the cost of dealing with archaeology is the reason why the industrial park stands empty. Indeed, as trowelfodder said, the reason for dealing with all the archaeology up front was specifically to try to make it more attractive to potential businesses, so that the seller would be able to flog the plots with a guarantee that there'd be no additional archaeological costs.

I think that this is not what the alluminium company seller did to "sell" the land. What we can see is that angalsy alu-minimum bought 500 acres plus of farm land in the late 60s developed a factory on a quarter of the area -with very little evidence of any archaeology that I have been able to acertain,and which needed a nuclear power plant to run turns some of it into a cuddly park and then manages somehow to flog off 113 acres, six years ago, for untold millions to a bunch who thought that an aluminum plant was not enough of an impact on the invironment in the area and that a big car park would be nice. Aluminium plant goes bust allegadly and currently is presumably a brown field site.

Mean while "archaeologists" do good job with a bunch of no hope diggers presumably on short term contracts and bring archaeology into disripute with allegations that we cost little babies in incubzators lives 3 million plus when our get out of jail card would be an evaluation report that said this will cost you five to ten million to dig and take five years do you realy want to go ahead. And if they did not say that what did they say? I still cant believe (based in the universe of goggle) that there was not an environmental impact assesment for this site. EU monies EU directives. Still it all adds to my faith in how to wring the savings/profit/pension out of little old ladies.

[Unitof1]

does anybody know the title of the evaluation report for this site on which the total strip was based?

[Marcus Brody]

Hasn't Unit made any provision for his old age?

It was mentioned on a thread a couple of months ago that Unit used to work in the oil industry. Since then, I've liked to imagine that he lives in a big house bought for petro-dollars with an income that derives primarily from a fat pension from this former life, and that he occasionally does a little bit of archaeology for pin money, in between fulminating against charity units, English Heritage, museums, pensions, and volunteers. I should stress that I've got no proof that this is the case, it just gives me a little bit of comfort to think that this level of obsession and outrage could be overcompensating for something!