Have you used the ICE Conditions of Contract?

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quote:it is just up to the client to decide whether they think it is worthwhile.

I think that archaeologists should specifically identify the owner of the archaeology to consider whether it is worthwhile. Developer funded archaeology is undertaken because archaeology has identified that nationalism has a vestment of ownership on behalf of society in archaeology (not that society exists). I think that you should make a distinction in these muddy waters between clients who own the archaeology and those who don’t quite.

quote: is where the link between the construction industry and archaeology comes in - you have to pay for archaeological work under conditions of the planning permission.

Although the construction industry might go and arrange the structure of the permission they are funded, almost always, by an owner of the permission who has probably never laid a brick in their life but who is committed to the scheme and has to have control of the ground in which the archaeology is found. So I think that the archaeologist has to justify the archaeology in relation to the Requirement for the Scheme for the permission, not what type of concrete mix they are going to use. The archaeologist has to understand the now as well as the past and has to be involved in the cost benefit analysis. Although some understanding about how engineers build bridges is interesting (mainly because I can show them that almost all examples will fail and not for structural reasons!) archaeologists are involved in why they are building bridges and I don’t think that is to be found through a so called link to the construction industry.

The EIAs have made this blatantly obvious. The people who want the schemes quite rightly need to control that permission (outcomes, costs) as much as possible. As considerations of the reasons for the scheme archaeologists are employed and taken to public inquiries and used to show that the mitigation put in place is adequate. Apparently the construction industry has changed the archaeologists presence, through the ice contract, to consultant archaeologist is taken to public inquires.

Public inquires are adversarial courts and archaeologists are put in such places to explain the adequacies of the mitigation. As adversarial places they need adversaries because if there is no opposition, the scheme as presented does not need to be changed. Most public inquires are often little more than the presentation of the EIA in which the consultants will be at pains to point out that all the relevant statutory authorities have been consulted and presumably are in agreement with the permission from their point of view. It then does not help, if you’re an adversarial type of a person if the codes of conduct of the ifa make it difficult for an archaeologist to cast doubt on another member and when the ice contract makes it appear that archaeologists recommend that archaeologist to leave that platform to consultants.