A survey of UK Field Archaeologists

[matthew.law]

Hi all,

As I'm out of the country right now, I've extended the survey until January 31st. Please do take a look if you haven't done so already, and please do forward the link to your colleagues and friends.


http://wikiarc.limequery.org/index.php?s...&newtest=Y

All the best

Matt

[matthew.law]

Hello, survey closes a week from today. If you haven't filled it out yet, please do!

cheers,

matt

[BAJR Host]

AND THATS AN ORDER!!!

?When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend.?
William Blake

[matthew.law]

Hello everybody.

The survey is over, and the votes are being counted...
Hopefully we will have finished the real report, which I'll put on Scribd, next week.

A big thing to note is that there were only a maximum of 160 respondents (maximum because not everybody submitted an answer to all the questions). I completely accept that that is due to a failure of marketing on my part, and next time around will try something else like targetting units as well to distribute surveys among their staff. It does also perhaps (maybe I'm just defending myself now, you decide ) say something about how field archaeologists are using the internet to learn what's going on in archaeology (although I imagine Hosty could probably confirm that the BAJR jobs page gets a lot more hits than any other BAJR page). As you might suspect, the overwhelming majority of respondents - 106 - came from the BAJR fora. Unfortunately there wasn't a way for me to track how many came from the BRITARCH e-mail list, but I have suspicions it wouldn't be (m)any...

If you would like a rough idea of what the report will say, I have put the summary statistics online at http://www.wikiarc.org/surveyresults I apologise that it really is just a big list of stats, and not eloquent prose. That is coming sometime soon... ish(I had to get help for that bit!).

One interesting thing, given the fact that there are a lot of BAJRites who answered, is that we're (in general - personally I don't quite fit into this) older, more experienced, more likely to be on permanent contracts, and more male than I would imagine the whole profile of the profession to be, yet a lot of us aren't better paid, or any more likely to be in the IfA or a union. And only one person *said* they were in the Digger's Forum. :face-huh:

Gosh, that was a long message.

Matt

[RedEarth]

Just a quick look through it is quite interesting... more well paid that I would have thought!

I don't recall exactly how the survey was worded now - under ethnicity was Anglo-Saxon really an option or did someone actually choose that! Either an archaeological joke or I am slightly scared!

Could you have put Hiberno-Norse or Post-Roman Briton? Or perhaps decendant of native Mesolithic inhabitants, or Druid! Ties in nicely with the other thread about reburial of ancestors...

[matthew.law]

Ethnicity was a blank field, so you could write whatever you choose...

Perhaps, like Oddie, some people are just very confident who their ancestors are :face-stir:

[RedEarth]

quote:Originally posted by matthew.law

Ethnicity was a blank field, so you could write whatever you choose...

Perhaps, like Oddie, some people are just very confident who their ancestors are :face-stir:

Excellent, you could have opened a proper can of worms with that one.

I should have put Jedi! Damn!

[achingknees]

quote:Originally posted by RedEarth

Just a quick look through it is quite interesting... more well paid that I would have thought!

Well paid? You are being ironic??

Over a third less than 17k, over half less than 20k. Average UK wage 28-30k (ish).

[RedEarth]

quote:Originally posted by achingknees

quote:Originally posted by RedEarth

Just a quick look through it is quite interesting... more well paid that I would have thought!

Well paid? You are being ironic??

Over a third less than 17k, over half less than 20k. Average UK wage 28-30k (ish).

I can't comment on what people's wages actually are but from personal experience of what I assume they are it seemed quite high.

I would have expected more like three quarters under 20k and of those probably more than half under 17k. Perhaps it depends on where in the country you work as well. I'm not sure how relevant the average UK wage is to anyone's wages, archaeologists or otherwise; how is that figure even worked out?

[Oxbeast]

Its a mean, Redearth, and so not particularly accurate in such a wide range of date. I think it is also 'graduate jobs'. It would be nice to get within one standard deviation of the mean though.....