I don't really believe it is meaning using volunteers in place of paid archaeologists but it isn't clear in places. However, there does seem to be talk about training and improving understanding of aspects of PPS5 for the volunteer sector. I've mentioned concern at this sort of thing before from the point of view that there are plenty of professionals who could do with this sort of training but never get any opportunity so that it might be easier to get decent organised training as an amateur than as a professional, which is insane! It frighteningly reads in places as a manifesto for keeping the lower eschelons of professional archaeology in their place, i.e. alongside interested amateurs, as the 'great and the good' will hardly suffer as a result. Say what you like about community projects, and I have certain expressed my concerns with some aspects of them, but they have potentially set the bar now for this kind of thing. Sounds great for the handful of people employed through such means, but what about the rest.
Increased public access to the results of archaeology in all senses is definately a good thing, but how it is achieved is a different matter. If commercial archaeological projects are forced by some wording in a PPS5 replacement then will everyone else feel the same obligation? The academic whose project maybe takes 25 years to be published, the local society that depends on one or two individuals making results available before they die, the wealthy private funder on their own land? Why do commercial archaeologists always end up being made to feel like the villains of the piece?
Increased public access to the results of archaeology in all senses is definately a good thing, but how it is achieved is a different matter. If commercial archaeological projects are forced by some wording in a PPS5 replacement then will everyone else feel the same obligation? The academic whose project maybe takes 25 years to be published, the local society that depends on one or two individuals making results available before they die, the wealthy private funder on their own land? Why do commercial archaeologists always end up being made to feel like the villains of the piece?