1st April 2011, 01:11 PM
Yeah I spotted some aggregate companies advertising for 'graduate archaeologists' or some such to do DBA's etc. Also seen such a company let two students 'excavate' and record an entire IA/RB settlement coz they said they could do it cheaper than our company. Think the post ex of that 'project' was passed around several proffesional units after the students had 'excavated' the site as they made such a mess. Don't think that site will ever make sense now.
Construction companies are very good at finding undergrads or post-grads (or cheap pretnd consultants) who can apparently do the work of a proffesional commercial company coz they got a degree (or getting one). The resulting consultancy, DBA and WSI as Dino points out are often a joke.....and effectively cripple any effort to find any archaeology afterwards.
Its all heading back to the bad old days of entire pipelines being reduced to an intermittant watching brief with the poor archaeologist on site chasing round blind trying to find the machines stripping topsoil as the engineers 'dont seem to know where they are' and totally unaware of where important remains may be.
Because of course a list of stuff on the HER and NMR is often not a good reflection of what may be there.....but those with permitted development rights are using these 'DBA's' as an excuse not to do any trial-trenching, or decent geophysics, or a proper assessment of what might be where, or allowing enough time to deal with any archaeology as'none is expected'
!
Construction companies are very good at finding undergrads or post-grads (or cheap pretnd consultants) who can apparently do the work of a proffesional commercial company coz they got a degree (or getting one). The resulting consultancy, DBA and WSI as Dino points out are often a joke.....and effectively cripple any effort to find any archaeology afterwards.
Its all heading back to the bad old days of entire pipelines being reduced to an intermittant watching brief with the poor archaeologist on site chasing round blind trying to find the machines stripping topsoil as the engineers 'dont seem to know where they are' and totally unaware of where important remains may be.
Because of course a list of stuff on the HER and NMR is often not a good reflection of what may be there.....but those with permitted development rights are using these 'DBA's' as an excuse not to do any trial-trenching, or decent geophysics, or a proper assessment of what might be where, or allowing enough time to deal with any archaeology as'none is expected'
!