23rd June 2011, 03:06 PM
At the cost of sounding like a right old git, I think we have seen the best of it. Not just because of the appalling situation of fieldwork at the moment, but also the degrading of individual skills through units becoming huge monoliths with specialists taking on photography, surveying, planning (nearly all GPS driven) and top heavy managment all trying hard to justify their existance. Did you go into archaeology thinking that "I want to sit at a desk and work out budgets and write 'dry as dust' assessments for clients" when the equivalent grade of management in any other industry pays two or three times as much for similar work? I would guess not. I would say that you wanted to access your heritage, make it accessable to others, to take part in unique, individual research and to touch the past. Or am I being an old romantic? As to the government - the only way they will take any notice of anything is when it is politically expiedient to do so and they have to do something as a sop to the electorate. That will only happen if the public support a service they see as relevant to them - libraries, the NHS, schools, free access to museums etc. Archaeology needs to speak with one voice with public support, but, as the DF has found, even getting diggers to unite as a body has been, so far, fruitless. See past threads ad nauseum.