30th August 2012, 07:32 PM
Wax Wrote:Considering the mish mash of different organisations that have a finger in this country's archaeology how do the forum members think the archaeological heritage of this country would best be managed, preserved and researched?
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What is the point of University excavations (vanity projects?)
As someone in academia I thought I pick up on this- from my point of view University excavations have two purposes
(1) Training (cue moans about how University digs don't prepare people for commercial excavation)- of course they don't. In the same way a medical degree doesn't make someone a surgeon- but it does provide students with basic understanding of the excavation process which can be built on. At the end of the day while it would be great to have a degree course that involved 30 weeks digging it is can't be done. Universities are having to provide at undergraduate level a degree that meets the need of the would be excavator, wannabe geophysics specialists, aspirant finds specialists, people who want to be teachers, those who want to do a general humanities degree etc etc - it is a fine balancing job to cover all the bases.
It is worth flagging up that it is getting increasingly difficult to provide the same student training experience that many of use had (ie long away digs during the summer). As more and more students need to work during the vacations, more and more universities are having to do their training digs in term time- as a consequence this means they tend to be run locally with the students staying in their uni accomodation and being bussed in each day.
On a practical note, I'd love to hear how people think University training can be *realistically* improved? What do you wish you'd learnt at University when you started your first commercial job? And perhaps more tendentiously, if Universities won't / can't provide extensive field training, who should? How might it work financially? CPD, training post etc etc?
(2) Research- obvious answer really- but university excavations provide relatively rare opportunities to look at one site over a long period of time and in detail with (relatively) little pressure on time.
cheers
David