IfA to be abolished and replaced by......

[P Prentice]

I may be wrong on this but my understanding of your previous posts on this subject is that you don't really want it to be representative.



I think I am one of those MIfA's you would rather see the back of. }

it is currently possible for amateurs to gain mifa. i dont think this is helpful to our profession - do you?
having gained mifa as a digger i am as aware as anyone else of the skills and commitment field workers often have but i dont think i called myself an archaeologist until i started writing reports and i dont think i properly understood the value of the fieldwork i was doing until then either. clearly this could imply that i was not such a good digger but i would say i became one when i started writing reports. i have seen many good diggers and many poor diggers and i see lots of reports written by people who obviously did not spent enough time in the field thinking about what they were doing because their reports are frankly crap. i also see curators who are very good at issuing briefs and checking wsi's but cant see whats what when they monitor a site because they never spent enough time digging.
i want good archaeologists to be recognised by the extent of their knowledge and skills becuase currently they are not.
your average day sounds tough. one of the reasons you have to do those ours is the unregulated nature of our industry which allows absolutely anybody to bid for work, anywhere and employ people on absolutely any p&c they can get away with. the ifa attempted to raise working conditions but eventually gave up because too many non-ifa operators undercut ro's by paying below minima ..............