28th August 2013, 07:44 AM
barkingdigger Wrote:Why? Is there a shortage of workers? Or a new cap on total annual spend by developers for Planning Conditions? Why ration investigation of a finite resource if there is commercial money to fund it? Or is this really about the "one decent site a year" part... Sure, negative evals are a bit dull, and we cannot excite the public with them, but they are the only part of the picture for which we can pretty much guarantee funding! And each one helps us get a better picture of the past, so we can home in on the better sites.
If my knees were younger I'd love to see archaeology get back to the good old days when the only sites being touched were big juicy high-profile ones full of goodies, dug by dozens of eager folks and stretching over multiple seasons, but back then there weren't many full-time archaeologists trying to make a living - just a few well-off boffins and lots of volunteers! And loads of evidence never got a look-in, but we were happy in our ignorance. We can't have it all ways - either we have less info from fewer interesting digs, or more info with a higher proportion of boring "duds".
The real issue isn'yt how we ration the evaluation cash, but rather how we ensure the good sites get done properly. Cutting back on evals won't improve the "juicy" digs - it'll just save the developers some cash and put more archaeologists out of jobs. As I said before, the two issues are not directly related.
Yes there is definitely a shortage of competent diggers, but my point is that negative results bring the profession into disrepute and allow us to be characterised as red tape and thus more likely to be cut!