16th July 2010, 11:12 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:If no archaeology's getting destroyed by people building things then that's pretty much all of the people using this website scr***d then, starting with the diggers, the people who manage them, the specialists who look at the stuff they dig up, the curators who deal with the planning etc, the academics who justify their existence by teaching/training all of the above, etc etc......expect there'll still be seasonal work on the Time Team until Channel 4 pulls the plug on that....Bigpicture, how is that 'a bit of light' for British archaeology???? :0
Dino (and apologies Hosty - appreciate this is a bit off topic and a bit ancient now) my original post was borne out of a sense of panic that we will all soon be scraping the barrel in a way that will be considerably worse than a year ago. The impressionI get is that most people in the private sector feel things are improving. Certainly, things at my unit are getting busier. My concern is the same as you have reached yourself, that with the closure of BSF, road schemes and any other number of essential infrastructural projects that were giving a glimmer of hope to the construction industry as a whole will have a knock-on effect to those of us within the private sector, especially when there aren't any local authority archaeologists to enforce planning conditions. My comment about no development being a "bit of light" was just a flippant remark that even if we're all unemployed, at least this stuff won't be destroyed because everyone else in the construction industry will be in the same boat (i.e. not working).
I think most people on this website are fundamentally on the same side - the whiff of desperation from the regular posters on this site to attack those of us less regular ones is a bit stifling. Is it any wonder that there are so many visitors to the site and so few posters? I await round two....