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There is always clearing, if you really want to go, or are hedging bets.
The customer gets, what the customer wants.
Is the customer always right?
How to think, how to plan, how to organize, how to do and how to pick up the pieces.
Lets face it education is about finding the balance for all of the above with the human experience of finding a satisfactory balance to your personal development.
Drinkers degree, studious degree, flappers degree, yada yada yada.....
txt is
Mike
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Looks like Queens, Bradford and Lincoln are the places to go based on the old recruitment stats.
or are they still going to be relevant, given that the next phase of employment may not necessarily based on large demographic clusters in geographical locations, or on long standing professional relationships, but rather, on whatever it will be based on.....
txt is
Mike
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Quote:quote:Originally posted by BRahn
What are they not learning? They're not learning HOW TO PUT UP THE BUILDING, that is, the equivalent of excavation and recording in archaeology!
Not really. Architects design buildings; Engineers work out how to keep them up, and Builders build them.
D. Vader
Senior Consultant
Vader Maull & Palpatine
Archaeological Consultants
Your lack of archaeological imagination disappoints me Curator
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Quote:quote:Originally posted by Sith
Quote:quote:Originally posted by BRahn
What are they not learning? They're not learning HOW TO PUT UP THE BUILDING, that is, the equivalent of excavation and recording in archaeology!
Not really. Architects design buildings; Engineers work out how to keep them up, and Builders build them.
And they are all (I presume) quite differently qualified.
If you replace the process of building a building for carrying out an excavation and change 'architect' for 'manager', 'engineer' for 'project officer', and 'builder' for 'site assistant' that is perhaps in some way comparible to archaeology (feel free to point out how it isn't). The major difference? All the people on the archaeological site are, in terms of paper qualifications, exactly the same in most cases. In some cases the assistants will even have higher academic qualifications than the managers. The major distinction is different areas of experience. Does archaeology therefore need more specialist qualifications (HND type etc) or better inter-level training and specific qualifications for different tasks that can be acquired by anyone with a degree? Some of this type of thing is already happening of course, but a more structured approach might be helpful.
Discuss/pull apart.
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Quote:quote:Originally posted by RedEarth
Does archaeology therefore need more specialist qualifications (HND type etc) or better inter-level training and specific qualifications for different tasks that can be acquired by anyone with a degree?
You don't need a degree to be an archaeologist. Especially to dig sites and to write them up. You need attitude and aptitude, and you need the correct training, and to read a bit and be prepared to learn, research and ask questions. A degree might be used by employers as a shorthand for a certain level of 'intelligence' (but not common sense) and awareness, but most will recognise that practical experience counts loads more.
Why do units ALWAYS ask for '6 months/12 months etc fieldwork experience etc' but NEVER ask for a first class degree? You don't need a degree.
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I think that the current unstructured relationship between qualifications and job role is a temporary one. Admittedly it's being going on for years, but events may catch up with the profession- if we end up in an economic situation like the early 80s which led to Manpower, we may find archaeology has a structure foisted upon it from outside, with the long-term unemployed encouraged to work on public schemes.
It's been suggested on the Today programme this morning in relation to government and third-sector projects.
This would leave those with non-Manpower jobs in supervisory/ PO/ PM roles and a workforce of diggers that are more numerous but less qualified than the current pool. I suspect this would lead to greater job security and conditions for those in the supervisory/managerial roles, but the effect on diggers and those new to the profession (e.g. recent graduates) is more difficult to predict.
Apologies if this is digressing from the topic!
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Quote:quote:Originally posted by bob
You don't need a degree to be an archaeologist. Especially to dig sites and to write them up. You need attitude and aptitude, and you need the correct training, and to read a bit and be prepared to learn, research and ask questions. A degree might be used by employers as a shorthand for a certain level of 'intelligence' (but not common sense) and awareness, but most will recognise that practical experience counts loads more.
Why do units ALWAYS ask for '6 months/12 months etc fieldwork experience etc' but NEVER ask for a first class degree? You don't need a degree.
Indeed, and I never suggested that you do, but in my experience most people coming into archaeology do so having first done one. Maybe it has become more common in the last 10 years or so.
Would a system where managers and supervisors had academic qualifications and 'diggers' had experience and more specific skills-based training be a better one? How on earth would that even work? What would graduates do? How would non-graduates find there way into archaeology without things like Manpower services to give the opportunity in the first place? It's well beyond my tiny brain!
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Posted by RedEarth: Quote:quote:If you replace the process of building a building for carrying out an excavation and change 'architect' for 'manager', 'engineer' for 'project officer', and 'builder' for 'site assistant' that is perhaps in some way comparible to archaeology (feel free to point out how it isn't) ... Discuss/pull apart
An architect designs a building (=project), prepares a specification and then oversees its implementation by a contractor, to ensure that it is built as designed. On that basis, a better archaeological parallel for the architect would be a consultant, rather than a manager. Otherwise, I think that your analogy works quite well.
On training, the big differences are as follows:
- an architect must be both academically and professionally qualified in order to practice, where an archaeologist doesn't formally need either;
- to obtain their qualifications, architects need two years of professional training and a year in professional practice after their first degree (note - professional training, not academic training, so it does not equate to archaeological postgraduate degrees);
- an architect with only a first degree can work as an 'architectural technician', but cannot call themselves an architect
Now, I think it is accepted on this forum that one or more degrees in archaeology are useful, but not essential, to work as an archaeologist on excavations or field projects, at any level of responsibility. The majority of people doing such work do have degrees, but there are many very good archaeologists who don't.
However, my own view is that a high level of academic knowledge and understanding is required to analyse, interpret and report on the results of archaeological projects, and a high level of professional expertise is required to adequately design and manage or oversee archaeological projects. The best way to obtain those academic and professional abilities is to study for at least one academic degree and to obtain professional training, and to combine both with a substantial requirement for field experience.
There already is an informal divide in archaeology between career diggers on one hand, and those who want to move into jobs that require the academic and professional skills that I mentioned above. Would it be a good idea to formalise that in a similar way to the architects, with different specified levels of qualificaiton required for each of the two career paths?
1man1desk
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I started it, I guess I'd better keep commenting on it.. 
Obviously the comparison isn't going to be 1:1, it just popped into my head from Hosty's mentioning of relative job prospects. I do still think it's a valid comparison for questioning how and whether we want the discipline as a whole to evolve. What I'm certainly NOT doing is saying 'This is the way we should be doing things'!
I've been wondering whether some other form of pre-qualification for work as a digger would be preferable to the current situation. Specifically, racking up three years+ of university-grade debt is not ideal given the low salaries a starting digger can expect to earn. (Heck, even given the salaries a PO can expect to earn, but the whole salary thing has been rehearsed enough) Being one of, if not the, lowest-paid graduate profession is NOT a badge of honour, IMO. So for people who are keen on archaeology and want to dig, would a quicker, more focused, and less expensive qualification be preferable?
I take on board the argument that interpretation has to take place at the trowel's edge, however there's nothing to say that a quicker more vocationally-oriented training wouldn't be able to teach those interpretive aspects. Put another way, you need to be thinking about your contexts, stratigraphy, the structure of the site as a whole, and the ultimate research goals of the excavation while you're troweling, but you don't necessarily need to be fully conversant with the articulation of Marxist and culture-historical archaeology to dig a feature properly.
The downsides I foresee off the top of my head would be possibly even greater separation between diggers and managers, the pure diggers still might not get paid what their technical skills merit due to their now being 'less qualified', some university departments might close down from a drop in enrollment,...anyone else want to chime in?
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There did used to be such a qualification, the HND from Bournemouth which turned out very high quality excavators with very little interest in theory. This HND was replaced with a foundation degree, and now (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) is a Batchelor's degree.
With departments being asessed against each other, I'm not sure that there is much milage for them in offering lower degrees. The IfA sponsored NVQ might help with this in future though.
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