7th September 2011, 05:38 PM
I'm not a member of the IFA, and if I was asked why not, I'd say that it's because I've never needed to be in order to find work. I realise that this is an entirely selfish position, and that I (and everyone else) should join in order to improve the profession as a whole, but there you go. From that perspective, chartered status and an associated restriction on who could describe themselves as an archaeologist would probably force me to sign up, as I wouldn't be able to work otherwise, but I'm not certain that such a coercive approach would be beneficial - it would simply result in a lot of unhappy members who felt that they'd been co-opted into the IFA against their will. I wouldn't be in favour of the IFA going down that route.
The other reason I've never joined goes back to some of the first sites I worked on, where there were a number of PIFAs and AIFAs who didn't seem to know one end of a trowel from another (we were never visited by any MIFAs), while the people I learned the most from weren't members. This led me to the (possibly mistaken) conclusion that a lot of IFA members were solely in it so that they could put another string of letters after their names, a prejudice that I'm sorry to say has stuck with me.
The other reason I've never joined goes back to some of the first sites I worked on, where there were a number of PIFAs and AIFAs who didn't seem to know one end of a trowel from another (we were never visited by any MIFAs), while the people I learned the most from weren't members. This led me to the (possibly mistaken) conclusion that a lot of IFA members were solely in it so that they could put another string of letters after their names, a prejudice that I'm sorry to say has stuck with me.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum