27th March 2007, 04:08 PM
Some of the replies to this thread make my blood boil. Life as a free-lance is no easy option. The rates that are paid are derisory. Ok if you take early retirement with a full pension it may be a nice earner on the side but many of todays free-lances will work today until they drop. I am personally OK as I am married to the director of a large museum service yet i struggle to pay tax despite having a PhD, a hundred plus publications and a world-wide reputation. I have been paying into a pension for 25 years and if I am lucky it may pay for a yearly hol in Brittany. The other problem is this will increase the deskilling of the profession. Most free-lance specialists are an ageing bunch. Museums have shed themselves of curators and now have a crisis as no one knows anything about collections anymore and university politics have led to artefact specialist being seen as second rate. Does it matter. Well someone is eventually going to point out that standards have fallen so much that much of the commercial archaeology produced is not worth the paper it is written so why pay for it. Why spend tens of thousands on an excation to know it had 52,00 sherds of pottery no once can date never mind anything else, the site had beed totally misinterpreted amd most of the finds misidentified.