7th January 2011, 06:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 7th January 2011, 06:32 PM by Dinosaur.)
kevin wooldridge Wrote:There might well have been a lot of archaeologists employed through MSC in the late 80's but I doubt it would have constituted the 'majority' of funding for British archaeology - I think the Museum of London units, DUA and DGLA - employing well over 400 archaeologists during that period, mainly on developer funding, would have constituted a large proportion of the money coming into UK archaeology.....
Yes, but there were probably thousands employed on MSC projects at their height (again, does anyone have any figures?), and due to their nature they were generally 6 month-year plus sites, all the ones I worked on were multi-year projects with huge workforces and budgets to match, the first ?1m+ job I worked on was a 1980s MSC scheme, for instance. Due to the restrictions (eg the need to be able to 'employ' people for a minimum of 6 months) there wasn't any such thing as a small job in the MSC circus....none of those pesky watching briefs and trial trenching, just medium to big excavations. And I might point out that most of the archaeological units that I worked for during those years usually had one or more big MSC projects running alongside their 'normal' stuff - one that springs to mind is WYAS who were running Pontefract Castle and Castleford simultaneously 1984ish with huge MSC crews (Cas ran for years, don't know about Pontefract), suspect that was a really large part of their turnover during that period? Most/all of the other county units were doing the same, eg. the Worcester site I mentioned dwarfed the rest of the county unit's workload certainly in terms of manpower (around 50ish) while it was running