standards anyone?

[Marcus Brody]

Whilst this is true, one would assume that a 'Council archaeologist' visiting an excavation that falls outside of their employment brief, is doing so first and foremost as an archaeologist with an interest in the project and not as a individual frustrated that his or her sphere of influence is too limited to have a direct influence on the project strategy.

Yes, that would be my understanding too, and I don't think my post suggested anything else. I wasn't suggesting that a Council archaeologist visiting an excavation that falls outside their employment brief would be doing it because they were frustrated that it fell outside their 'sphere of influence', and I certainly wouldn't expect them to spend their time citicising excavation strategy or recording standards - that would be a pretty rude thing to do on a site where they were basically a guest! I was simply responding to the question in Wax's earlier post about who monitors that standards on community and academic excavations.

I'm not so sure that academics who don't inform someone they don't need to inform about an activity with which that person has no involvement necessarily makes the academic a 'bad' person ....

Again, I don't think my post says anything about academics who don't inform Council archaeologists of what they're working on being 'bad people', I was simply observing that this is something that happens sometimes. I know such a thing wouldn't be a requirement, so the academic wouldn't be doing anthing wrong as such, I just think it would be helpful if they did, both as a way of fostering closer links between the academic and commercial sectors, and of ensuring the information on the sites that they're excavatin is available in the HER for other people to use. After all, if I'm working on a site in a field, I'd like to know if a team of students from a university at the other end of the country have spent every summer for the past 5 years excavating a complex Roman settlement just across the road. I'm sure we've all experienced how long it can take academic excavations to reach the publication stage, and in the interim, it'd be useful for people working in the commercial sector to be able to at least find out that that a potentially relevant and significant piece of fieldwork has taken place.

by the time the excavation comes about the role of the 'Council archaeologist' has finished. I would suggest that the same applies in UK law. By the time an excavation or monitoring resulting from a planning condition comes about, any legal remedy resulting from such work is the responsibility of planning 'enforcement' and not planning advice....

I don't think that this is correct, however, at least in the UK (I don't know about Norway). As most planners wouldn't know a well-conducted excavation from a hole in the ground, the Council archaeologist does still have a role in monitoring excavations conducted as a condition of planning consent. At that stage, their role is to advise the planner whether the work has been conducted to a suitable standard, whether further work is required, and whether the condition can be discharged. Yes, the only legal remedy if a developer ignores a condition would be in the hands of the enforcement team, and it would probably need to be the planner who actually told them to do something about a breach, but the planner would only be aware that work had not been done to a sufficient standard because the Council archaeologist had advised them that this was the case. A planner visiting a site would be unlikely to say whether the archaeological work was of a suitable standard, and so would be reliant on his/her archaeological advisor, who would need to have visited the site in order to determine this.