30th April 2010, 12:28 PM
Even under the old 'County Unit' system there was still a requirement for 'floating' diggers, possibly even more so than now (since there was less scope for units to move people around geographically), indeed that was what many would regard as the heyday of the 'circuit digger'. Hence it would in no way help to create a 'career structure' for diggers, they'd still be forever moving on to whichever county happened to have a lot of fieldwork on at that moment having just been laid off from one with none. Seem to recall that council pay rates and which grades were being used seem to vary rather a lot too, several council units I worked for paid diggers armed with degrees rather less than the cleaners (no disrespect to cleaners, fine, hard-working body of people in my experience). If you put the funding of archaeology back under government control at any level, whether local, regional or central, it would probably be a disaster on the wages front!