28th October 2006, 10:55 AM
As I said seeting guide prices is both naive and pointless.
By now every consultantcy will have rule of thumb costs which is all guide prices ever can be. Some curators say a 5% spend on archaeology is not unreasonable and others say the cost goes up an order of magnitude from assessment to evaluation to excavation.
For geophysics there is an almost uniform cost across the country.
Guide prices for urban sites can never work ie X acres will have an archaeology bill of Y because there are so many variables:
thickness of deposits
date of deposits
type of deposits
the extent they will be disturbed ie what the foundation scheme will be or not
location
logistical difficulties
for example.
Guide prices exist for post X - as a percentage of the field work costs which I find unhelpful.
In the example David quotes he quotes for an evaluation the following variables
Location
Size
Sampling strategy
Depth of deposits
Likelyhood of archaeology being present.
which will costs £XXXXX ie £10000+
Of these 3 of the variables will be unknown when the developer does their costs calculation or even if an evaluation is neccessary. My estimate for a rural site would be under 10k not over it with the standard probability of archaeology being found.
There is also the question of who is taking the risk. So I would suggest that a guide price is more of a guide formula to be applied with specialist knowledge of the likely values of the variables and how much they can vary.
This is called consultancy. So yes I am against the notion that a committee of digger project officer and others should sit down to attempt to generalise what cant be generalised when many of them will have little experience of costing projects.
Peter Wardle
By now every consultantcy will have rule of thumb costs which is all guide prices ever can be. Some curators say a 5% spend on archaeology is not unreasonable and others say the cost goes up an order of magnitude from assessment to evaluation to excavation.
For geophysics there is an almost uniform cost across the country.
Guide prices for urban sites can never work ie X acres will have an archaeology bill of Y because there are so many variables:
thickness of deposits
date of deposits
type of deposits
the extent they will be disturbed ie what the foundation scheme will be or not
location
logistical difficulties
for example.
Guide prices exist for post X - as a percentage of the field work costs which I find unhelpful.
In the example David quotes he quotes for an evaluation the following variables
Location
Size
Sampling strategy
Depth of deposits
Likelyhood of archaeology being present.
which will costs £XXXXX ie £10000+
Of these 3 of the variables will be unknown when the developer does their costs calculation or even if an evaluation is neccessary. My estimate for a rural site would be under 10k not over it with the standard probability of archaeology being found.
There is also the question of who is taking the risk. So I would suggest that a guide price is more of a guide formula to be applied with specialist knowledge of the likely values of the variables and how much they can vary.
This is called consultancy. So yes I am against the notion that a committee of digger project officer and others should sit down to attempt to generalise what cant be generalised when many of them will have little experience of costing projects.
Peter Wardle