1st December 2005, 07:29 PM
Quote:quote:Originally posted by 1man1desk In a predominantly (although not entirely) graduate profession we will never address this issue successfully until the universities can attract ethnic minority students to archaeology courses.
One point I was trying to make was that archaeology does not have a set of formal entry qualifications. It strikes me that if the spirit was willing and a little thought applied we could easily be attracting intelligent, but not necessarily university 'qualified' staff into archaeology.
1man1desk has identified many of the reasons why the demographic profile of archaeology and museology remains unchanging, advertising in a very few specialised locations and insisting on a pre-qualification in the very stereotype you might want to avoid, white, male, archaeology graduates.
Is it not possible that a very basic (but effective) form of job advertising, i.e adverts in job centres in areas of mixed population might not achieve a greater demographic diversity.
On Outreach projects can I recommend the Museum of London Shoreditch Park project. Here they have involved the very diverse population of an inner London borough in the archaeology existing beneath their local park. And also explained to a lot of local people that the big building taking up most of their canal side has something going on inside that they can get involved with, without any presupposed knowledge of the subject