EDITORIAL - Antiquity. the state of the next generation - Martin Carver

[Sith]

I remember once being told that the role of training in the PPG era was for the universities...

It's a shame that nobody told them that. :face-stir:

[Unitof1]

The most important thing for any profession is to ensure that new young talent has access to a career and that the career has a structure in which creativity is rewarded. In Britain, we have done next to nothing in this regard—and it would be difficult to say who has been the more feckless—the directors of large companies or the heads of archaeology departments in universities. The new lecturers are drawn in principle from the cohort of doctoral students, implying that the PhD is intended to provide an apprenticeship. Accordingly it has been streamlined:instead of spending twenty years on an enormous topic, the student spends three years on something more manageable, a course or programme likely to provide a useful experience and destined for expeditious completion. Strangely however, the required output remains the same: a book-length treatise

it stricks me that Carver did not have a career structure let alone one based on a PhD. Be quite interesting to work out his pension. He seems to do well to pick on heads of large companies and heads of archaeology departments with suggesting feckinglessness when he was head amateur of probably all fecklessness and pension grabbing activity over the life time of that crap public servant careea organisation known as the ifa but no mention here hay

but here is the real ifa sign of run by lost plot

Consider the case of large flat sites that require excavation in area. The effective method, as we have known for decades, requires definition of a horizon by lines of trowellers, viewed from a tower. There isn’t a better way of doing this, but the practice was discontinued because it didn’t suit the economics of archaeological firms; they prefer to deploy antiquated two-man trenches or test pits in which little will be seen, but nobody will realise it

[SIZE=3] lets"we" consider the case of large flat sites that require excavation in area. Lets look up standards and guidence on how to establish what is a large flat site that requires excavation in area. Probably be needing some form of evaluation. Wont bother refereing to the ify guidences because they were created by somebody who says that two man trenches are antiquated (and troweling lines are not?) and in which little will be seen but nobody will realise it which is the same as saying the guideneces which they created are wrong. Ha ha yes we have had decades of it.[/SIZE]

[P Prentice]

.... Lumping them all together and acting as if they are the same is a hindrance and potentially damaging.

i disagree - the potential is the same

[P Prentice]

Volunteering on most commercial sites will not get you training, just a sore knee.

obviously peeps will be better trained on a bajr dig hosty, but some of us have a long track record of providing excellent training on commercial excavations

[Wax]

So how does having some of the largest units in the country actually registered charities who are not allowed to make a profit work in the free market? Do they set a very low price for the work ie what they need to make to keep going and drive down the price of archaeology as a whole? Is this fair competition in the world of commercial archaeology?

[Unitof1]

you starting to work out the size of the stichup Wax. If your interested heres a midway point in the stitchup by the charity unit scam sorry a lot of the links lead to the society of antiquaroies and they fail http://www.appag.org.uk/documents/appag_report.pdf
basicaly the parliamentry archaeology group was stitched up by charity units like molas who represented themselves as commercial archaeologists. They never got picked up on it.

[Unitof1]

sometime in the early ninties I went to a dribbling lecture by a retireing wainright who said that he couldnt quite put his finger on what was wrong with what had been created post rescue. What he was really saying was that he was retiring.

[BAJR]

some of us have a long track record of providing excellent training on commercial excavations

Glad to hear about another exception ...


And so the noodling comes to the conclusion that we are powerless to do anything?

[Sith]

So how does having some of the largest units in the country actually registered charities who are not allowed to make a profit work in the free market? Do they set a very low price for the work ie what they need to make to keep going and drive down the price of archaeology as a whole? Is this fair competition in the world of commercial archaeology?

As someone regularly commissioning fieldwork, I've seen no evidence to suggest that the types of organisation you describe submit noticably lower prices than purely 'commercial' outfits.

[P Prentice]

As someone regularly commissioning fieldwork, I've seen no evidence to suggest that the types of organisation you describe submit noticably lower prices than purely 'commercial' outfits.

there has though in recent times been a spate of tendering at below cost prices for the sake of turnover by the 'types' described