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

[Mike.T.]

How many companies offer training in report writing to first time report writers?

I don't think any do when obviously they should. If you're writing one for the first time it seems to be a case of looking at examples of other reports and using them as a template.

[Sikelgaita]

how can accomadation/travel costs disappear so easily (it seems) ? and yet money for technical work be tight as a badgers @ss ?

Because when a job is costed you know how many person days you have allowed for and therefore can build in appropriate accommodation and subsistence costs. As it is often difficult to predict what technical costs will be needed until the job is ongoing it is sometimes easy to get these wrong and many clients do not want to see huge lists of contingencies to cover every eventuality. Also if the number of person days is underestimated and there needs to be additional accommodation and subsistence paid for, the technical work may get 'trimmed' to cover this.

[GnomeKing]

the technical work may get 'trimmed' to cover this.

double whammy then.

[P Prentice]

Thanks, really thought provoking.



I don't see why it is unhelpful. Plenty of local societies run community projects. Amongst them are some very experienced amateur archaeologists whose skills and experience (both in the field and reporting) far outweigh those of some MIfA's I have met. I might even take this one step further and (controversially) argue that this could also be applied to some of the experienced metal-detectorists out there. Might not allowing reputable metal-detectorists into the IfA help build bridges between the two communities?



How many companies offer training in report writing to first time report writers?

An archaeologist, keen and eager and wanting a career in the job they love, is given the opportunity to write a report. That report takes longer than the tight budgetary constraints allow. It requires a great deal of editing. Tut, tut, tut say the managers not good enough. Tut, tut, tut, say the curators and consultants, not good enough. No more opportunities for that budding report writer and so they remain a digger and unable to reach that elusive CIfA benchmark. As with fieldwork, report writing improves with experience.



I would apply this statement equally to archaeological consultants.

Partly I believe this happens because, when looking to appoint, Local Authorities and consultancies sometimes tend to see BA or MA after someones name and think that these are meaningful indicators that the person being considered for the post is a good archaeologist, even if they have only limited fieldwork experience. Maybe that university essay they brought along as proof of their written skills clinched it. Why did that candidate with 10 years experience in the field not supply some wriiten evidence. Most archaeology degrees are Bachelor of Arts yet the majority of the skills required in the field are practical and technical with some physical thrown in. To me it seems that this dichotomy is central to the problem. The CIfA seems to recognise academic achievement above all else yet for many archaeologists they spend their time learning and improving a different skill set.



We are in agreement on this.



Apologies, my experience in archaeology is a bit more wide ranging than just fieldwork. A little bit of artistic license was applied (at the present time at least) but I am sure that this working day is not far from the truth for many diggers, supervisors and Project Officers.



I think that undercutting in archaeology is a much more complex issue than just RAO vs Non RAO. Undercutting comes in many forms, many are subtle. For instance the definition of a workplace. I would be interested to know how your employer defines your place of work and then ask why some RAO's seem to interpret the definition of 'place of work' differently for diggers.

i dont disagree that amateurs often have superior skills to professionals but they often dont have a clue either - which currenty is no bar to mifa. i also think that you dont have to be a good archaeologist to be a good project manager by the way.
i would see cifa as a person one could confidently approach for advice regarding the whole range of archaeological interest, be that standing up in court to excavating a deeply stratified site, publishing such a site, knowing if a site has been dug properly and having the wherewithal to do something about it when it is not. so i dont think it matters what your job title is or what your qualifications are because we all know they dont mean diddly squat when it comes down to being a good archaeologist. if the vested interests get there way, which they will unless enough who care stand up for themselves, cifa will be as useless as mifa

[P Prentice]

....how much money (nationally) is being diverted from actual archaeological investigation and into weekly accomadtion, as it seems that units from end of the country are whizzing to the other, whilst equally capable archaeologists are zooming past in the oppasite direction ?
- perhapes i am wrong...
but how come i see all kinds of far away companies winning tenders over close-by ones? - how can accomadation/travel costs disappear so easily (it seems) ? and yet money for technical work be tight as a badgers @ss ?
and how can this possibly be good for (longterm) lifestyles ?
(just a thought)

uberunits can only sustain themselves by increasing their market share - low margins on big jobs requiring many employees. it is unsustainable and produces ever shorter contracts and ever poorer conditions. crisscrossing the country for these jobs is a shocking waste of resources which you correctly deduce is diverted from the workforce. the model is same for construction and it has never improved the lot of the majority of them in the last couple hundred years.

[Dinosaur]

Scary, seem to be agreeing with far too much of what PP's saying on here!

Mike T. - we do actually give people some training when they've never written a report before - the results would be a disaster otherwise! Usually takes the form of mentoring and getting them to read a few similar reports before they start, and they get (constructively) edited to h*ll the first few times (having been warned in advance), plus the management are quite happy to chuck stuff back if it's c**p since poor product reflects badly on the reputation of their company - although it seems a fair number of units couldn't give a **** in that department.

PP is right about understanding the archaeology on site in order to create a report worth a s**t. I've usually got a broad idea what I'll be aiming for in the final report before a trench is even marked out, but that comes from experience so probably unfair to expect that of the 'beginner' PO. There are always going to be 'bullet points' (things in the project design/WSI ticked off to keep the Consultant and Curator happy - helps if you know your curator's quirks!...have been learning quite a lot about post-medieval garden design recently, for instance:face-crying and things that are going to be getting more coverage than others in the publication. One small pit can be the star of the show, and that needs realising at the time, on site, and dealing with appropriately at the time, no good in PX realising that maybe you should have sampled 100% of the fill rather than just the routine 40L or whatever. Some scientific sampling techniques (OSL and the like) often require booking the specialists in advance, so if the bit of landscape's only going to be available for a week or three you've got to be planning it before you even start. As an e.g., I've got a job coming up on a Neolithic site where we may or may not have stuff suitable for OSL profiling/dating, but that'll only work if I leave them some big, wide, strategically located baulks to extract samples sequences from, so that affects how I approach the job from the outset.

Excavation reports can also be used for driving research agendas, given the right level of forethought, on several occasions I've got specialists to include quotable comments which I've known will come in handy in the future, and all sorts of helpful things can be innocuously put in publications to be wheeled out further down the line - "Joe Bloggs has suggested that...{ref}, and therefore it is recommended that etc..." - but that's probably food for a different thread?

[Mike.T.]

Mike T. - we do actually give people some training when they've never written a report before - the results would be a disaster otherwise! Usually takes the form of mentoring and getting them to read a few similar reports before they start, and they get (constructively) edited to h*ll the first few times (having been warned in advance), plus the management are quite happy to chuck stuff back if it's c**p since poor product reflects badly on the reputation of their company - although it seems a fair number of units couldn't give a **** in that department.

Maybe your company, whoeverthatis, does provide report writing training, but from my experience it's a case of getting on with it yourself. I didn't have any report writing training as such. Mind you I didn't get any excavation training either and I think I've got the hang of that now. After 25 years.

[Sith]

..many clients do not want to see huge lists of contingencies to cover every eventuality.

True but if they accurately reflect the risks of a particular site, it can be better to present the potential costs involved. I would rather know it might cost me X than be unpleasantly surprised when it turns into 3X.

..the management are quite happy to chuck stuff back if it's c**p since poor product reflects badly on the reputation of their company - although it seems a fair number of units couldn't give a **** in that department.

Good. I've had a few interesting experiences of the latter which I found surprising in the extreme. The most surprising aspect was the view that as long as it looked good, the content didn't matter.

[John Wells]

The nature and content of this thread clearly demonstrates the need for an authoritative chartered body.
A Chartered Institute is not just about its members and professional standards but also about its field of endeavour in the broadest context.
In the case of archaeology, it can be a collective body with clout, that can independently seek to safeguard the nations heritage, especially at times when other organisations may be at threat of political influence and financial constraint.

[P Prentice]

emphatically reasonable - as ever