17th July 2011, 10:17 AM
Have been given more details
Sheffield City Council are having a meeting on Thursday morning, at 11.30 in the town hall to try and push through a 50% cut in South Yorkshire Archaeology Service.
This includes the local SMR. This comes after a 25% cut this year which leaves a rump service with only 3 members of staff left. The service is funded by 3 other councils too - Barnsley, Rotherham, and Doncaster, and nominally Sheffield cannot push through this size of cut without them. The agreed cut was 15%, which was bad enough, but Sheffield are trying to bulldoze through and persuade the others to accept this much greater cut. Clearly it will leave the county without an effective advisory body for commercial work, with everything that this implies (rubber stamping of development without proper archaeological scrutiny I imagine), and a probable effective end to access to the SMR.
This comes on top of policies that have effectively transformed the city museum, which has a very large and regionally important archive and nationally important elements too, into a glorified visitor centre with a posh cafe. It has had no archaeological curator for two years. Consequently, it now refuses to archive new material, or make the archive available for research. This is causing chaos for commercial archaeologists and community projects alike, and is an effective ban on academic research in the city and locale.
The infrastructure which supports all aspects of archaeological activity in this region is already in a state of partial and significant collapse. These new cuts, I fear, will in the medium term see an effective end to almost all archaeological fieldwork and research.
steven.wilson@sheffield.gov.uk is the email to express your feeling that these services cannot be cut further and that there will be no return from any further cuts.
Sheffield City Council are having a meeting on Thursday morning, at 11.30 in the town hall to try and push through a 50% cut in South Yorkshire Archaeology Service.
This includes the local SMR. This comes after a 25% cut this year which leaves a rump service with only 3 members of staff left. The service is funded by 3 other councils too - Barnsley, Rotherham, and Doncaster, and nominally Sheffield cannot push through this size of cut without them. The agreed cut was 15%, which was bad enough, but Sheffield are trying to bulldoze through and persuade the others to accept this much greater cut. Clearly it will leave the county without an effective advisory body for commercial work, with everything that this implies (rubber stamping of development without proper archaeological scrutiny I imagine), and a probable effective end to access to the SMR.
This comes on top of policies that have effectively transformed the city museum, which has a very large and regionally important archive and nationally important elements too, into a glorified visitor centre with a posh cafe. It has had no archaeological curator for two years. Consequently, it now refuses to archive new material, or make the archive available for research. This is causing chaos for commercial archaeologists and community projects alike, and is an effective ban on academic research in the city and locale.
The infrastructure which supports all aspects of archaeological activity in this region is already in a state of partial and significant collapse. These new cuts, I fear, will in the medium term see an effective end to almost all archaeological fieldwork and research.
steven.wilson@sheffield.gov.uk is the email to express your feeling that these services cannot be cut further and that there will be no return from any further cuts.