Is a decent specialist report a luxury?

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Ben - I've been talking to a few people since TAG and some of the stuff I've been hearing is quite interesting, and pertinent. One curator, at one of the few well-staffed planning depts left, told me they always send back reports if the CTS hasn't been used, but with many, they have so little clout that if they do send reports back because the CTS hasn't been used, the council planning dept and the developer's lawyers descend on them like a ton of bricks for holding up work on 'a minor technicality'. In the original draft of the paper we did talk about the problems of curators not having specialist knowledge, but had to cut it due to lack of time. The county I highlighted where the number of reports using the CTS has fallen from 80% to 40% in 6 years states in all briefs that the CTS should be used. It's being ignored, by organizations which are all RAOs. The fact the remains that standards are falling rapidly, and there is one organization that claims to uphold standards, and that's the IfA. If it's not their fault or responsibility, then who's is it, and what is the point of the IfA existing? I refuse to join until they start looking like they actually are doing something about the state of archaeology, and actually enforcing their own standards. We're both constantly amused by the claim that the fact the IfA isn't working is the fault of people who do not belong to it.

WRT to budgets - if you read the IfA standards, they state that all artefact analysts in a project should be involved from the very beginning. They never are. We highlighted this fact in an older paper (on my academia.edu site somewhere) - guess what? It was ignored completely and things carried on as usual. So we can confidently state that just about every single RAO has been constantly in breach of IfA standards since they were introduced. We pointed this out. What did they do about it? Nothing. Would they have done something if we were members of the IfA? I think I can guess the answer to that, and it's not 'yes'.

Chris and I have been dismissed as grumpy old b*stards since we started doing these papers in 1993. It's a lot easier for people to do that and carry on whinging about everything in the pub than to actually get off their backsides and try to sort this mess out. This hasn't happened overnight - it's been a gradual decline for 20 years, and it's getting exponentially worse.

With regards to policing ourselves and doing work to a high standard - it won't happen. It's got to be compulsory for everybody. As Bajr effectively said earlier, if we budget to do work to a high standard, we'll lose the tender to someone who'll give the pottery to a digger who 'knows about pot'. And it's true. Easy to blame the curators, but they don't really have the staff or clout to do it - neither they nor HERs are mandatory, and I suspect if they get too pushy, they'd find themselves ignored or 'cut'. Remind me to tell you about the Northampton Sol Central development over a pint sometime. Can't do it publicly or I'll end up in court

We don't expect to be able to change the system overnight, but we need to start pushing ASAP. Or we can do nothing and watch archaeology go down the pan.