6th February 2013, 11:11 AM
How about £6.19 per context. What would you charge?
You could work out the cost of a context by adding up all the money charged over time say for example a year and divide by the number of contexts recorded in that year. I say a year because I would be trying to make some comparison to a salary but you would probably have to do more than a year or have a very big sample of context types to get a realistic figure from different diggers. I am a bit of a lumper so for example if I call something a soil I get out of separating it into topsoil and subsoil, and others might drag out five different horizons.
I linked to the graduate thing to show that the reality of their pay was based on market forces and that the actual pay that some industries say that graduates might be getting might not be realistic.
The fact is that the paradigm âhow much should you charge to fill in a context sheetâ is not easily transferable into the paradigm of a salary paid over time simply because some contexts take longer to process and some are more valuable than others. I quite often get asked how much the one grotty piece of pot that I have found in a three day watching brief is worth. Is the answer three times my day rate, or is it the time it took to see it and put it in a bag and process it, probably about five minutes of my day rate or is it what you can get for it on ebay.
BUT vitally more importantly I could add to my rates all the time I am not working and this is the thing with context based archaeology is that terms of salary do not relate to most sites as they are very short lived and even shorter lived the more efficiently you process them. The system that you are so doggedly trying to hold to is some salary based structure which can only apply if you concentrate the contexts of others from a wide area and devise a structure in which to process those contexts over time.
And a problem with comparing systems is finding like for like terms. So does your trainee fill in context sheets. If they do then in my system they are an archaeologist and what you pay them is what I am competing against. In your salary based system the trainee is actually being trained to process the contexts of others as well and therefore and I am not joking not only are they being paid to excavate contexts they are being paid to learn how to process other peoples contexts so you could argues that the cost of the contexts that they produce is less than what they are paid.
Actually I might be a splitter
You could work out the cost of a context by adding up all the money charged over time say for example a year and divide by the number of contexts recorded in that year. I say a year because I would be trying to make some comparison to a salary but you would probably have to do more than a year or have a very big sample of context types to get a realistic figure from different diggers. I am a bit of a lumper so for example if I call something a soil I get out of separating it into topsoil and subsoil, and others might drag out five different horizons.
I linked to the graduate thing to show that the reality of their pay was based on market forces and that the actual pay that some industries say that graduates might be getting might not be realistic.
The fact is that the paradigm âhow much should you charge to fill in a context sheetâ is not easily transferable into the paradigm of a salary paid over time simply because some contexts take longer to process and some are more valuable than others. I quite often get asked how much the one grotty piece of pot that I have found in a three day watching brief is worth. Is the answer three times my day rate, or is it the time it took to see it and put it in a bag and process it, probably about five minutes of my day rate or is it what you can get for it on ebay.
BUT vitally more importantly I could add to my rates all the time I am not working and this is the thing with context based archaeology is that terms of salary do not relate to most sites as they are very short lived and even shorter lived the more efficiently you process them. The system that you are so doggedly trying to hold to is some salary based structure which can only apply if you concentrate the contexts of others from a wide area and devise a structure in which to process those contexts over time.
And a problem with comparing systems is finding like for like terms. So does your trainee fill in context sheets. If they do then in my system they are an archaeologist and what you pay them is what I am competing against. In your salary based system the trainee is actually being trained to process the contexts of others as well and therefore and I am not joking not only are they being paid to excavate contexts they are being paid to learn how to process other peoples contexts so you could argues that the cost of the contexts that they produce is less than what they are paid.
Actually I might be a splitter
Reason: your past is my past