How should British Archaeology be run

[kevin wooldridge]

I'm intrigued as to what used to happen? How did the old hands learn?

My experience (32 years in the field now...) was that brand new starters (totally inexperienced) were placed with slightly more experienced folk until such point as they could demonstrate competence at whatever task they had been assigned. These would clearly be fairly mundane tasks but inevitably would release the slightly more experienced person to get on with a task further up the chain of command.....That sounds eminently sensible and straightforward, but there were a couple of subtle and useful variations.....very senior members of the hierarchy finding themselves with a spare hour, afternoon or day would often come and work at 'grunt' level doing the more mundane tasks. This would allow 1) communication between the lowest and the highest and 2) a chance for 'managers' to evaluate the less experienced staff. Secondly, whilst folk fresh to archaeology might lack some necessary fieldwork skills, it didn't mean they were totally unskilled. I can remember a number of people being plucked from the ranks of us 'newbies' and given illustration jobs, because someone had bothered to ask them if they were able to draw....I also remember one more elderly newbie happening to be a trained surveyor in a previous career and his talents used, another person being very skilled at data entry (in the days when data entry meant more than just click and shift)...I think the lesson was that amongst a team there might be a multitude of talents that could be used when required but there should also be a base level of experience and expertise that everyone was expected to gain and use, with even the more senior members of the team reverting to digger as and when required.

I think the last point is the one that the majority of digging teams have done away with - where promotion to the 'gods' doesn't necessitate still practising the essential skills of the job - and probably the one as a profession we most miss...I'd call upon those with more complete memories than mine to recall the date that archaeological management stopped joining in with the physical side of the job....my memory is that that it was sometime about 1989 when I first realised there was a whole new clique of archaeologists whose souls were black as soot, but never got their hands dirty........