Archaeology: Hidden treasure - Grey Literature

[Dinosaur]

Thanks for the welcome :face-approve:

Odinn - 'proper' (as in the traditional, keep-your-children-away-from-them) circuit diggers were pretty much killed off as a breed by the switch to archaeology being funded mainly through Community Programme back in the '80s (which meant that CP sites were staffed by people sent from the job centre, meaning 'proper' diggers in theory had to spend 6 months on the dole between jobs to qualify...), the advent of PPG16 which changed the way the archaeology was done, and the withdrawal of central government digging money. Alcohol probably finished off most of the rest. Modern diggers are a different breed (gross generalisation!!!) - suggesting spending 6 months living in a tent and having to share a sheep trough with the sheep for a wash would probably get you lynched with today's workforce.... :face-crying:

[BAJR]

I'm sure there are a few of us left but oh, how I laugh at the job centre ... trying to retrain me... and then teh desparate realisation that getting teh doles had no longer become a right... and these first weeks when you had to wait to qualify. and you stare at teh person behind the plexiglass screen.. saying well what the hell do I do for food now! Did you not save anything from you last job... :face-huh: Hmm... thinks back to quaffing and shovels... er.... no.

Things have indeed changed... the circuit is all but gone... a few hardy fold survive... but teh latest from Unite... is they would be intersted in seeing Archaeology (commercial) as part of the Construction Industry... no different from surveyors, architects, electricians, etc...............

Now that will scare the academes!

[Dinosaur]

Luckily I managed to pretty much avoid all that by being the right age/experience at the time so I was one of those annoying people who always got a 'waiver' for the supervisor jobs - was never short of work in CP days and they were all 6 and 12 month contracts even where there was only 2 weeks-worth of archaeology

I'm afraid when I'm trying to have a quiet pint and someone asks "what do you do for a living" I tend to say I work for a construction industry sub-contractor anyway - 'snot lying, after all, and it always seems to kill off any follow-up questions that might involve putting the brain in gear.....in an emergency, after decades hanging around on building sites, I can get pretty technical on civil engineering....

[Jack]

Is there a specific definition as to what a 'circuit digger' is then? I've always thought that working the circuit just meant moving from county to county following the work.

[Dinosaur]

Circuit digger probably means whatever the original folks of that ilk thought it meant, certainly not what it's used for in contemporary parlance (where most people seem to be upset at having to move around and not having a 'steady' job, and complain about not being able to buy a house) :p

[Odinn]

Odinn - 'proper' (as in the traditional, keep-your-children-away-from-them) circuit diggers were pretty much killed off as a breed by the switch to archaeology being funded mainly through Community Programme back in the '80s (which meant that CP sites were staffed by people sent from the job centre, meaning 'proper' diggers in theory had to spend 6 months on the dole between jobs to qualify...)

It was a rhetorical question really, to show how out of date the professor, to whom I was referring, was. My first ever dig was an MSC scheme.

[GnomeKing]

"you need the people who have done the site work (hopefully at least one of whom is writing it up!) to have done their job properly and actually thought about it. You can't decide what the relationship between those two ditches is unless someone has worked it out at the time!" - Oldgirl.

do you mean we cant just rely on them being Temporal Waste Contamination Removers?

-however i have seen the "ditch relationship" argument turned grossly head-over-ass at times...i have heard an excavator say that they do not believe a reliable single relationship can be concluded from there investigation - their manager has turned round and told them that they bloody well better find a relationship (there has to be a relationship...), and nobody else is in the position to 'find' it (otherwise i'll have too just try and guess in post-ex [somebody sack this person...we need nice clear drawings and records, not uncertainties...])

well i heard some of that... it is also possible for poor managers to state 'we have empowered our diggers, look, they do their own interpretations, and nobody is better placed...' - but without concomitant Guidance, Leadership, Insight and Archaeological Vision these 'best-placed persons' become unconscious participants in a Management lead culture of quantity over quality, 'simplicity is best for me' mentalities, and a race to scrape the floor with methodological and interpretive standards....

As stands at present, sometimes the digger is not the best placed person, because they have not been guided (or have been misguided), because they enmeshed in Company Culture and Ways of Doing Things, and because they are under pressure to simplify to the point of absurdity...

[Dinosaur]

My first ever dig was an MSC scheme.

At the time everyone was absolutely amazed how many really good archaeologists emerged from the depths of Britain's unemployed masses, and a lot of the ratty-old-diggers/unit managers etc of today started that way. Bit of a one-off period in archaeological history but seems to have worked out ok

[GnomeKing]

well worked out into something anyway...

[Dinosaur]

"....however i have seen the "ditch relationship" argument turned grossly head-over-ass at times...i have heard an excavator say that they do not believe a reliable single relationship can be concluded from there investigation - their manager has turned round and told them that they bloody well better find a relationship (there has to be a relationship...), and nobody else is in the position to 'find' it (otherwise i'll have too just try and guess in post-ex [somebody sack this person...we need nice clear drawings and records, not uncertainties...])....

What do you do in the small percentage of cases where there just isn't a discernable relationship? In a lot of areas around here ditches on rural sites all tend to be filled with the same homogeneous, nondescript brown gloop (if it's raining) or rock-hard clay (if it's not), and sometimes either there isn't a handy tipping rock in just the right place or you've already mattocked it out before spotting it (doh!)....often those relationships have to be worked out months later in the office ('that ditch had a bit of Iron Age pot in it at the other side of the site, but this ditch runs parallel to the ridge and furrow which cut the first ditch'....) :face-huh:

Are we straying away from 'grey literature' or just widening the parameters? :p