17th January 2006, 02:13 PM
Here's a few practicalities involved in Troll's proposal for active policing of standards by the IFA (or any other single organisation).
The BAJR Whos Who section lists about 117 local/county/regional territories covered by curators. They vary in size and the amount of archaeological activity, but lets assume (very conservatively) that the average territory has, say 20 PPG16-related interventions a year (including desk-tops, all types of survey, intrusive evaluations and excavations, all of which are covered by IFA standards).
That would make 2340 interventions a year. Lets say the 'police' check-up on 50% of them - thats 1170 interventions - and each one takes an average of 1 man-day of 'police' time (also a conservative estimate). An average person works 226 days (roughly) each year, so 1170 days is equivalent to 5 (and a bit) people full-time.
That assumes that my figure for the number of interventions is right - I think it would really be higher - and that each intervention only takes one day to check - also unlikely (how effective would be monitoring at the rate of one day per project?). And it does not allow for any follow-up, enforcement action etc. So, we are probably really talking about more than 10 people full-time, just to do monitoring that locally-based curators are already better placed to do. And I doubt if Troll would accept only half of all projects being monitored.
The IFA has a total staff of 9, not all full-time. So, you are talking about more than doubling the size of the staff, not to mention other resources and the cost of inevitable legal challenges. Who would pay for this? We already have complaints about the level of subscriptions - they would be at least doubled to fund this system. The IFA, to the best of my knowledge, has no other source of funds, and it is unlikely that EH would fund this system.
1man1desk
to let, fully furnished
The BAJR Whos Who section lists about 117 local/county/regional territories covered by curators. They vary in size and the amount of archaeological activity, but lets assume (very conservatively) that the average territory has, say 20 PPG16-related interventions a year (including desk-tops, all types of survey, intrusive evaluations and excavations, all of which are covered by IFA standards).
That would make 2340 interventions a year. Lets say the 'police' check-up on 50% of them - thats 1170 interventions - and each one takes an average of 1 man-day of 'police' time (also a conservative estimate). An average person works 226 days (roughly) each year, so 1170 days is equivalent to 5 (and a bit) people full-time.
That assumes that my figure for the number of interventions is right - I think it would really be higher - and that each intervention only takes one day to check - also unlikely (how effective would be monitoring at the rate of one day per project?). And it does not allow for any follow-up, enforcement action etc. So, we are probably really talking about more than 10 people full-time, just to do monitoring that locally-based curators are already better placed to do. And I doubt if Troll would accept only half of all projects being monitored.
The IFA has a total staff of 9, not all full-time. So, you are talking about more than doubling the size of the staff, not to mention other resources and the cost of inevitable legal challenges. Who would pay for this? We already have complaints about the level of subscriptions - they would be at least doubled to fund this system. The IFA, to the best of my knowledge, has no other source of funds, and it is unlikely that EH would fund this system.
1man1desk
to let, fully furnished