7th July 2010, 12:49 PM
Surely to some extent curation by commercial outfits already occurs 'de facto' - typically a lot of our clients come to us before submitting any form of planning proposal, we advise them on any form of archaeological implications, prepare any relevent documentation in support of the application including proposals for any mitigation, and quite frequently the local authority curator effectively just rubber-stamps it, glad that someone else has done some of their work for them. It also avoids the sometimes awful specs that some Local Authority curators issue (saw one today where the site probably has Roman ditches running across it east-west so why are all the proposed trial trenches also running east-west....trying to miss them or something?). I hate to admit it, but Unit isn't totally mad, this could be made to work across the range as long as there was some form of monitoring of standards....oh, suppose that would just be more curators.....:face-crying: