Is a decent specialist report a luxury?

[Dinosaur]

Probably best to leave out the...ahem...campsite bit though, some of the culprits are still alive! Anyway, the Bos now has holiday flats out back for us old gits who prefer sleeping in a bed these days (although those amazing outside toilets were a casualty of the redevelopment), should TGM ever want to have another season at Thwing - and he's still the guy to show the 'tricky' bits of pot to - irreplaceable!

[Kel]

he's still the guy to show the 'tricky' bits of pot to - irreplaceable!

And there's another good point - are any efforts being made to replace him? The only way you can really learn about pottery (as I'm currently finding) is to work with someone who already knows about it. You can do all the studying you like, but you eventually end up with a few boxes of mixed pot and a deadline, for which no amount of reading is a proper preparation. As someone has pointed out, the differences between hand-made pottery from different periods which use the same raw material sources, can be very subtle. Somebody has to train a specialist how to spot them, with the pottery in their hands. You won't be learning it from a book.

Does anyone know existing pottery (or indeed, other find type) experts who have "apprentices"? Is any attempt being made to transfer existing specialist "niche" expertise to others? Or are we just waiting until the venerable old guard retire in despair, so that we can bemoan the useless youngsters who will be left to carry the can?

Let's face it - a prerequisite for having a decent specialist report, is having a decent specialist.

[redexile]

There's one or two apprentices, mainly with the big units. I had one when I worked for Oxford a long time ago, and he's now a pot monkey at the MoL. The IfA Bursary Scheme has funded at least one that I know of (Hi Ben!) - the bursaries are one of the few useful things the IfA has done. I wish they'd stick to doing things like that and stop pretending that they're maintaining standards. That way, we'd all start making progress. I learned my craft back in the days of Council Units in the early 80s. I had some very basic training from a field archy who'd done pot for a bit, then got the bits which I couldn't identify and trotted off to show them to experienced specialists working for other units and the big museums, and the MPRG - Alan Vince at (then) DUA taught me loads over the course of an entire day, one-to-one, for free - he even bought me lunch! But that was in the days when we weren't competing with each other. Now, a trainee working on their own for a commercial company couldn't do that now as it'd be too expensive for them (time and travel), and why should anyone train a business rival's employee for free, which would add further expense.

[BAJR]

Let's face it - a prerequisite for having a decent specialist report, is having a decent specialist.

Now that is the truth... we are considering a thing called SE Scotland Skill Exchange where specialists can train... we are looking at this more as a social enterprise so it will cover everyone from School to Adult Learning, but also be available to archaeologists as a one to one as well. working on real material.

Yes it will cost... but with Social Enterprise it opens up funding, so should be affordable... magic words!

and why should anyone train a business rival's employee for free, which would add further expense.

Good point about that... and oft quoted... my reply is always the same. Another company is training someone who will come to you. :face-huh:

[redexile]

Good point about that... and oft quoted... my reply is always the same. Another company is training someone who will come to you. :face-huh:

I take your point, but I meant why would anyone train anyone for free while the person they are training works for someone else. That did used to happen in t'old days!

[pdurdin]

...why would anyone train anyone for free while the person they are training works for someone else.

What about students or unemployed graduates? If someone's going to put the time and effort in, surely the skills and knowledge would make a big difference with future employability?

[redexile]

It would be great, but what incentive is there for a commercial organization to train someone who's not going to work for them, at their own expense? Most of us pot monkeys are either self-employed or embedded with a unit. I'm not saying we shouldn't, but the units are all skint (allegedly) and I'm not going to create a probable business rival - I don't have enough work as it is!

[RedEarth]

Red Earth: 1) The 1960's dig was done when medieval archaeology as a discipline was effectively less than 10 years old. The dig was a rescue job by some academics and students in a city. For nothing. The modern one was done in response to a brief in a well-known Roman and medieval town by one of the largest commercial archaeology units in the country, and produced a group of pottery that a specialist would have reported on (well, me anyway) for less than fifty quid. The report also did not fulfil the brief, as the local type-series wasn't used.

It's useful to have some context, thanks, although still difficult to compare the two. Far more useful to compare like with like. Just cos an excavation was carried out in the 60s, when the discipline was young doesn't mean it wasn't well or even over-resourced by comparison with something developer-funded - presumably included access to free labour, university-based specialists on hand, free or subsidised equipment and space, as much time as you need for post-ex. Sounds great!

Anyway, not to have a go. I totally agree with many or even most of the points made, especially when, as you say, you can get a good specialist report for not much cash. I am pretty sick of seeing reports that can't even be bothered with that, although mostly the one-man-band type outfits in my experience.

[kevin wooldridge]

It would be great, but what incentive is there for a commercial organization to train someone who's not going to work for them, at their own expense?

Taking the construction industry as an example there is the Construction Skills Training Levy where all undertakings with an annual salary bill greater than about £75000 are legally required to pay a proportion to a centralised training fund.....a similar scheme for heritage bodies could be a way of ensuring that all archaeological undertakings in the UK contribute fairly and proportionately to the general training of the profession.....not quite sure how identification and payment to the construction scheme is administered, but I guess some kind of registration ala the IfA RAO scheme is involved...

[Dinosaur]

And there's another good point - are any efforts being made to replace him?

Actually I happen to know that at least one (and probably all) of his regional understudies take stuff to show him, and then occasionally come back with version 2 of their report referring to completely different pot types (eg for one site I have EBA types in version 1, which then became Peterborough Ware in version 2, and we know from TGM that the stuff was shown to him in between!) - this really doesn't inspire confidence for a post-Terry world! He learnt his trade in happier times where you could just turn up at a museum and look at their whole collection and get the whole ones out of the display cases and handle them. I suspect most regional museums these days wouldn't have the time and facilities/space to let one do that? And as Redexile has pointed out, its a lot of knowledge to hold in one's head and takes a lifetime, any TGM replacement should have been started on 30 years ago