6th July 2011, 12:35 PM
gumbo Wrote:As much as I hate to, I think a successful newcomer could do worse than think like an environmental consultant, improve their desk-based skills and see large-scale digging as something that happens infrequently in the increasingly streamlined organisation they work for.
While I fear that you may be right, and that looking to go into consultancy may be the most lucrative path for future archaeology graduates, I'd be very much opposed to this becoming the norm. If a developer is employing a consultant, I'd like to think that they'd appoint someone with sufficient experience and knowledge to do the job. I'm sure we're all familiar with the recent graduate who turns up on their first commercial site expecting to be in charge, on the basis that they've got a degree, don'tcha know, only to be quickly made aware of the yawning gaps in their knowledge of what to do on site. How much worse would it be if such a person went straight into a consultancy role, where they may be writing the specifications for fieldwork programmes, without ever gaining the knowledge of on-site archaeology at the trowel-edge?
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum