9th October 2013, 12:39 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:We also these days (well since about 1985 really ) have different designations of 'supervisor' i.e on site finds supervisor, on site survey supervisor. on site environmental supervisor etc etc helping to spread the general workload and concentrate specialist knowledge. Seems to me that School of Jack is talking about a form of supervisor that does a little of everything rather badly, and nothing in general very well, mainly cos of a failure to delegate. Is that really the model of UK commercial archaeology?
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: