4th December 2010, 02:29 PM
[FONT="]Cotswold do indeed have an academic panel (http://www.cotswoldarch.org.uk/about.htm), and when at MoLA we regularly used to use academic advisors chosen for specific projects to help shape the analysis and publication process and to comment on the draft texts. I imagine this is fairly common practice with most units? Also as stated above most National/Period/local society journals usually send off papers for comment to someone suitable before publishing.
Personally from my experience at several units I don't really see that there is a lack of research in commercial archaeology, certainly not in the projects that I have been involved with. We have clearly stated research aims linked to local/regional research frameworks and which we develop and evolve from eval to site to assessment according to the results.
I think as TimberWolf pointed out above that the difference between us and academic/local society/research digs is that they predominantly only dig at known sites where they have a good idea what they will find, so there will usually always be something more to say than on a 50 trench sterile eval. It does gets quite tedious how every university dig is always the earliest/biggest/latest....
We don't get to choose where we dig and have to be able to deal with a far wider range of archaeology. This may mean we are jacks of all trades, rather than masters of paleolithic copralites but our role is to preserve by record, assess the results and then carry out appropriate analysis and dissemination. If this needs specialist input, research and advice we seek it and act on it, whether that is in the form of getting in a specialist to do micromorph analysis, or getting a reading list off an academic, or even getting an external specialist to co-write the publication. It will always be possible to do more research on our sites, but we go quite a long way, providing good, clear data for others to mine for their own research.[/FONT]
Personally from my experience at several units I don't really see that there is a lack of research in commercial archaeology, certainly not in the projects that I have been involved with. We have clearly stated research aims linked to local/regional research frameworks and which we develop and evolve from eval to site to assessment according to the results.
I think as TimberWolf pointed out above that the difference between us and academic/local society/research digs is that they predominantly only dig at known sites where they have a good idea what they will find, so there will usually always be something more to say than on a 50 trench sterile eval. It does gets quite tedious how every university dig is always the earliest/biggest/latest....
We don't get to choose where we dig and have to be able to deal with a far wider range of archaeology. This may mean we are jacks of all trades, rather than masters of paleolithic copralites but our role is to preserve by record, assess the results and then carry out appropriate analysis and dissemination. If this needs specialist input, research and advice we seek it and act on it, whether that is in the form of getting in a specialist to do micromorph analysis, or getting a reading list off an academic, or even getting an external specialist to co-write the publication. It will always be possible to do more research on our sites, but we go quite a long way, providing good, clear data for others to mine for their own research.[/FONT]