9th October 2014, 10:39 AM
As a one man band I would say that it is the heavily subsidised units that set the rates. I would also like to point out that the vast amount of post application work is not about excavation costs but rather evaluation costs and getting them done. Personally I think that all evaluation should be done pre application.
I think that clients are a bit dim if the first time they evaluate their archaeology is post application. Any archaeologist who wants to take work on from them at that stage is doing little more than joining with "curators" in a symbiotic mugging. And the biggest problem with going to a mugging with public servants is that at best they are failed archaeologists but particularly they have next to no responsibility of how to make a profit out of archaeology (probably because they all once were ripped off diggers desperate to get experience and think that is what a digger is having then failed as hippies/old lags who started out in the 70s and 80s and think they're still doing archaeology for the social good) .
Nothings going to change until the planning system insists that evaluations are done pre-application and that's never going to happen because it would potentially leave out the curators?
I think that clients are a bit dim if the first time they evaluate their archaeology is post application. Any archaeologist who wants to take work on from them at that stage is doing little more than joining with "curators" in a symbiotic mugging. And the biggest problem with going to a mugging with public servants is that at best they are failed archaeologists but particularly they have next to no responsibility of how to make a profit out of archaeology (probably because they all once were ripped off diggers desperate to get experience and think that is what a digger is having then failed as hippies/old lags who started out in the 70s and 80s and think they're still doing archaeology for the social good) .
Nothings going to change until the planning system insists that evaluations are done pre-application and that's never going to happen because it would potentially leave out the curators?
.....nature was dead and the past does not exist