12th July 2014, 09:59 AM
Kill off what profession. At least Barking you can see my point that society does not pay us for the archaeology but likes to insist that "we" the "profession" does archaeology. I think that us archaeologists should treat society as polluters and demand that they pay for it. The model is simple. Society demands that a developer pays to undertake archaeology in return for permission to develop. This production has a cost which the developers bare but which also reflects the price of the production of the archaeology. We then say to society if you want this development at the cost to the environment here is the price (and we might charge more if we found good stuff) and the difficult bit is if they don't want it we chuck it in the bin but I would rather we saw it that any authorising authority was a polluter and insist that they pay for the archaeology. It just might be away to make museums statutory rather than museums are a benevolent charity. It would also have a profound affect on the curators within the authorities whatho Jack? It's not about wages and salary, it's about price and a bit of principle.
.....nature was dead and the past does not exist