The School of Jack Yr2

[Dinosaur]

The one who has to figure out/translate when they've written more than 'another posthole'?

[Tool]

The one I don't feel qualified to disagree with. Too often...

[P Prentice]

the one that has to arrive first, leave last, carry the feeble and the can, have an innate ability to 'see' a site and the wood for the trees and to know when best to take advice. halcyon days

[Jack]

Very good, you have all, mostly, picked up on potentially the most important expectation of a supervisor (Or usually Project Officer).......

Responsibility.

In the commercial world a supervisor will be expected to take on a varying amount of responsibility for their actions and those they are responsible for.
Depending on the size of the job, and the size of the team/area the supervisor is responsible for, this can include:

On small jobs:
Making sure the diggers make it to site and/or the accommodation (and back) every day
Making sure the site facilities turn up and are installed correctly
Making sure the site plant arrives and is put to work correctly and safely
Making sure everyone is working correctly and safely
Making sure the public are excluded and/or informed
Liaising with the client (on site)
Liaising with monitoring county/ national parks archaeologists/ EH representatives
Coming up with (alone or with help) site-specific strategies and making sure these are carried out safely and on time
Managing the team and the time-budget efficiently
Dealing with disciplinary issues
Dealing with safety issues
Making sure all the non-archaeological paperwork is up to date and is stored correctly from safety inductions, delivery notes and plant operator timesheets etc etc
If an incident does happen, for instance an accident....it is up to the supervisor to manage the crisis
Then ontop of this the supervisor will be responsible for making sure all the archaeology is dug and recorded correctly, that the archive is in order, no important relationships have been missed, features have been appropriately sampled, photographed, the finds have been bagged and tagged correctly etc etc

Large jobs are far more complex.

I'm sure I've missed out some important responsibilities.....maybe you can spot some?

But notice, how few of these responsibilities fall under the usual experience of a digger. There is a huge skill jump from digger to supervisor in commercial archaeology.

[Dinosaur]

It all seemed a lot simpler when the supervisor ran the workforce and the director (remember those?) did all the other stuff - worked better too, none of these bastardised, cost-saving 'project officer' thingies, one got the site dug and the other kept the rest of the world off their back and then claimed all the glory/infamy...

[kevin wooldridge]

It all seemed a lot simpler when the supervisor ran the workforce and the director (remember those?) did all the other stuff

We also these days (well since about 1985 really ) have different designations of 'supervisor' i.e on site finds supervisor, on site survey supervisor. on site environmental supervisor etc etc helping to spread the general workload and concentrate specialist knowledge. Seems to me that School of Jack is talking about a form of supervisor that does a little of everything rather badly, and nothing in general very well, mainly cos of a failure to delegate. Is that really the model of UK commercial archaeology?

[Tool]

It may not be the best model, but it's the one a lot of us seem to work under. Anything to reduce costs.

[Unitof1]

if you are self-employed theres no such thing as a supervisor and you are responsible for all of those things and more like making sure you undercut the competition.

[Dinosaur]

We also these days (well since about 1985 really ) have different designations of 'supervisor' i.e on site finds supervisor, on site survey supervisor. on site environmental supervisor etc etc helping to spread the general workload and concentrate specialist knowledge. Seems to me that School of Jack is talking about a form of supervisor that does a little of everything rather badly, and nothing in general very well, mainly cos of a failure to delegate. Is that really the model of UK commercial archaeology?

All the supervisor-this and supervisor-that is merely symptomatic of the [pointless] upgrading of everyone's job titles (or downgrading of the titles?), bit like all the diggers being called site assistants these days when back then it was actually a more senior post (meaning assistant to the supervisor/director)

Glad someone else has noticed how c**p the whole concept of PO is, the old fashioned supervisor and director roles were poles apart and in general suited completely different groups of people with very different approaches and skills/knowledge sets (I'm definitely in the supervisor camp), bodging them together to save money seems to me to be the root-cause of much of the decline in excavation standards over the last couple of decades, POs don't have time to supervise properly and by-and-large are diggers rather than management-minded, and the more junior ones don't have anyone looking over their shoulders and keeping control of standards [old-school directors tended to be aiming for a shiny monograph with their name (and only their name) on the front, so had some incentive, as opposed to the modern often badly-written and badly produced grey-lit productions that no one cares much about]


...oh, :face-stir:

[Jack]

We also these days (well since about 1985 really ) have different designations of 'supervisor' i.e on site finds supervisor, on site survey supervisor. on site environmental supervisor etc etc helping to spread the general workload and concentrate specialist knowledge. Seems to me that School of Jack is talking about a form of supervisor that does a little of everything rather badly, and nothing in general very well, mainly cos of a failure to delegate. Is that really the model of UK commercial archaeology?

Indeed, however, the model mentioned above is for a small job, say a 10 trench evaluation with a handfull of diggers. Larger jobs are, of course, more complex, with more levels of supervision and blurring of who is in charge of what. But The School of Jack will cover this later.