25th January 2007, 11:28 AM
Your present role is giving money to people who have ploughed out most of our archaeology in our life time. I assure you that it has nothing to do with heritage management
So what do we do, let what remains be ploughed away, or do we aim to preserve what remains? And try to prevent intensification of farming destroy areas that have no been ploughed with modern equipment for many years.
If you think - building-deeds- owner I assume that you would like all buildings to be maintained by the owner at the owners expense. Ideal world this would happen but presumably you would also be happy for buildings which have become redundant to be demolished and replaced with the soulless brick boxes that have homogenized the appearance of Britain's towns and villages today.
Source of funding - So what? I haven't decided anything, the politicians have decided, on tha basis of of reports of the environment being damaged in the name of production in the ealry 1980's, and the discovery that the rural economy is based more on services (mainly the tourist industry) than it is on farming to support measures that will maintain the rural economy. Why "farmers" in quotation marks - how many farmers do you actually know? Most of the ones I have ever met (and I have known farmers since I was a boy so I have met a fair few( want to produce good products in the best possible way without destroying the farm in the process, and leaving it in good condition to hand on to their successors (that would be heritage in its original sense). The alternative is perhaps to leave it to a totally free market and then see how much archaeology actually survives anywhere. If you tell me that developers will fund archaeological work without some form of compulsion or will preserve in situ if it reduces their profit margins then you are, I would suggest, living in a fantasy land. Similarly farmers have been intensifying their production because of free market forces - therefore if there is to be any archaeolgy surviving in the rural landscape there needs to be incentives for them not to destroy it. In the balance between the need to make a living and the desire to have a pleasant environment, the making a living will win out most of the time.
Vernacular buildings built on Corn Law profits - perhaps in some cases - most of the ones I deal with were probably built on the profits made by selling produce to the government during the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and then by supplying the industrial towns with fresh dairy products.
What do you suggest as an alternative? - most of the alternatives I can think of wouldn't leave much in the way of employment for any archaeologists as there would be no archaeology of any sort left to inherit.
I have no idea what you are talking about when you say 'pension scams' - who is scamming who and what is it do do with pensions?
So what do we do, let what remains be ploughed away, or do we aim to preserve what remains? And try to prevent intensification of farming destroy areas that have no been ploughed with modern equipment for many years.
If you think - building-deeds- owner I assume that you would like all buildings to be maintained by the owner at the owners expense. Ideal world this would happen but presumably you would also be happy for buildings which have become redundant to be demolished and replaced with the soulless brick boxes that have homogenized the appearance of Britain's towns and villages today.
Source of funding - So what? I haven't decided anything, the politicians have decided, on tha basis of of reports of the environment being damaged in the name of production in the ealry 1980's, and the discovery that the rural economy is based more on services (mainly the tourist industry) than it is on farming to support measures that will maintain the rural economy. Why "farmers" in quotation marks - how many farmers do you actually know? Most of the ones I have ever met (and I have known farmers since I was a boy so I have met a fair few( want to produce good products in the best possible way without destroying the farm in the process, and leaving it in good condition to hand on to their successors (that would be heritage in its original sense). The alternative is perhaps to leave it to a totally free market and then see how much archaeology actually survives anywhere. If you tell me that developers will fund archaeological work without some form of compulsion or will preserve in situ if it reduces their profit margins then you are, I would suggest, living in a fantasy land. Similarly farmers have been intensifying their production because of free market forces - therefore if there is to be any archaeolgy surviving in the rural landscape there needs to be incentives for them not to destroy it. In the balance between the need to make a living and the desire to have a pleasant environment, the making a living will win out most of the time.
Vernacular buildings built on Corn Law profits - perhaps in some cases - most of the ones I deal with were probably built on the profits made by selling produce to the government during the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and then by supplying the industrial towns with fresh dairy products.
What do you suggest as an alternative? - most of the alternatives I can think of wouldn't leave much in the way of employment for any archaeologists as there would be no archaeology of any sort left to inherit.
I have no idea what you are talking about when you say 'pension scams' - who is scamming who and what is it do do with pensions?