27th January 2011, 12:25 PM
I was able to go straight into work from Uni - BUT had spent the equivalent of 9 months or so on excavations during the summers of my degree (including shovel scraping the Gobi Desert-like site that was West Hes! - never shifted so much spoil in such a short time at any other point in my 30 year career!!) and to be frank a lot of the graduates who went into supervising MSC funded work were so far ahead of their diggers in terms of actually knowing what archaeology was and which end of a trowel was which that we probably "got away with" a lot of things that you couldn't in modern commercial excavations - potentially only to be discovered many years later when some poor sod tried to make sense of our context sheets in the delayed post ex.