9th October 2013, 12:54 PM
Dinosaur Wrote:All the supervisor-this and supervisor-that is merely symptomatic of the [pointless] upgrading of everyone's job titles (or downgrading of the titles?), bit like all the diggers being called site assistants these days when back then it was actually a more senior post (meaning assistant to the supervisor/director)
Glad someone else has noticed how c**p the whole concept of PO is, the old fashioned supervisor and director roles were poles apart and in general suited completely different groups of people with very different approaches and skills/knowledge sets (I'm definitely in the supervisor camp), bodging them together to save money seems to me to be the root-cause of much of the decline in excavation standards over the last couple of decades, POs don't have time to supervise properly and by-and-large are diggers rather than management-minded, and the more junior ones don't have anyone looking over their shoulders and keeping control of standards [old-school directors tended to be aiming for a shiny monograph with their name (and only their name) on the front, so had some incentive, as opposed to the modern often badly-written and badly produced grey-lit productions that no one cares much about]
...oh, :face-stir:
Well done! Go to the top of the class. Have a gold star!
This is at the crux of modern commercial archaeology...........as in many other careers, the rising tide of administration and paperwork required to fulfill safety and quality (ISO) standards and to comply with, for instance the CDM regulations mean that the poor old supervisor (now promoted to Project Officer) has little time to do anything else than deal with the client, visitors, logistics and paperwork.
Of course, the School of Jack has tried and tested tricks and lessons to ameliorate this condition.....but these come later in the course.
For now, in this lesson/seminar it is enough to make those clammering to be promoted, the ambitious, the recently qualified, the unknowing, that being a supervisor/project officer may not be all you think it is.
It is not being a digger who decides who does what section or what things 'are'
It is not someone who gets more money/cudos for doing the same job.
It is not a digger who gets lackeys to dance to their whim.
A project Officer is someone who has the weight of the world on their shoulders, the person that everyone complains too and about, the person who is supposed to know everything without being told/trained, the person who is blamed for everything, and most importantly the person who should be making sure as much of the archaeological information is saved as superhumanely possible.