5th June 2011, 03:23 PM
BAJR Wrote:also seems to allow for untrained individuals with no experience be allwoed to excavate without training on commercial sites. They are paid and so one would guess the client will be charged for having untrained staff carrying out commercial projects. How does this square up?
It's possible that if this became the norm, there would be an increase in the number of professional staff required on commercial sites, as people would need to be employed to provide a suitable ratio of professionals to volunteers, to allow time for some level of training or to ensure that work is done to a suitable standard. This could be achieved either by having a subset of staff on site dealing solely with training, or by all the professional archaeologists taking turns monitoring volunteers - I'd tend to favour the latter approach, as it would reduce divisiveness and give all staff experience of interacting with the public.
Whether the developer, who'd likely be expected to pay for this, would be happy to fork across additional money for extra staff to cover public involvement or suffer the delays that may result from the need to train volunteers during the course of the project is a separate issue.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum