Launch of MetroMOLA

[Dinosaur]

..... MetroMola are a welcome newcomer to an industry where single context excavation systems are either largely misunderstood or exist in mythological legend. Whilst a goodly few units can have a good crack at single context excavation and do a good job at it, there are plenty of units out there where the mere mention of the system has directors in tears. If we are to be honest, a good proportion of units and archaeologists rarely (if ever) employ single context systems and arguably-such systems are the bread and butter of Mola staff. There`s a USP worth having if ever I`ve seen one. I`ve been on many a site that desperately needed a single context approach and on some where the brief actually demanded it-only to be confronted with a director who thought that he/she could circumvent that by employing evauation techniques. Site gets trashed but hey ho.....time and money was saved. Ended up pulling my own face off in frustration.....

....errr, what exactly are you defining as 'single context recording'? - spending hours in PX looking for a tiny plan of a stake-hole lost somewhere on a A1 sheet of otherwise blank pervytrace? Almost all of the several dozen units I've worked for since the late 1970s have used some derivative of the Single Context system used by the Museum of London, but most units in more rural parts of the universe don't often have the joy of playing in 15m of stratified loveliness, frankly around here it's a bit of a treat to need to do a second overlay plan of something....and a few MOLAS section drawings seem to have more than 1 context depicted, so they're hardly innocent.....people adapt their recording systems to what works for them, as long as the information gets recorded adequately and is understandable to future generations what's wrong with that? Some of those 19th century watercolours of antiquarian finds are frankly often more informative than a lot of modern 'technical' site drawings (and more colourful too). I've had occasion in the past to come up with 'innovative' excavation and recording strategems to deal with tricky situations....just been reading one of the old Cirencester Roman cemetery reports where they were confronted with up to 1.5m of a totally featureless soil horizon with skellies dotted about in it at various depths - funnily enough the 'classic' single context recording system wasn't really applicable.... :face-stir:

[troll]

Greetings!
I agree entirely. A malleable methodology is the way to go-horses for courses indeed. My point is simply that as London-based field teams can often exclusively employ a single context system in complex strat on a day to day basis-this would be a good USP. As a client I would prefer such a team over and above a team that employs the system rarely. Of course that applies if as a client I have a site that requires such an approach. I have worked on sites before where a local unit found itself confronted with gorgeous complex deep strat and frankly-drowned. In fact on a few sites, the unit chucked a few large eval trenches in just to make a start-annihalating perfectly sexy sequences in the process. For clarity- I think that MetroMola have a good USP and I also think that the more competition there is in the marketplace the better.:face-approve:

[beamo]

This discussion appears to have conflated two separate but linked approaches to excavation and recording.

Single context excavation / recording is the system used by most archaeologists in the UK - it entails the allocation of individual unique context numbers to identifiable deposits (fills) and features (cuts, walls etc), with site plans indicating multiple contexts within some sort of phase or sub-phase.

Single context planning is a methodology used (particularly by MOLAS) for recording complex urban stratigraphy and involves the planning of individual contexts as separate entities on separate pieces of permatrace that can then be overlain - this is the system that leads to the situation described by Dinosaur.


Beamo

[Unitof1]

Sorry geodan- ment gpstone don?t know why?

Well said deano but to agree with troll - I would rather dig with people who have done single context planning even on a site where we are multi contexting. Its gets very frightening when you find yourself with muticontexters who have never single context planned. I find that they get very irate when you point out that they don?t know why they are doing what they are doing.

Agree with Redeath, all the big units (charity) have been unsustainable for years without lots of ?help?. The charity accounts give mere glimpses of what the help is in most cases. Some like molas don?t seem to publish any accounts. The current molas game of setting up a so called different company is a bit odd mostly because they have not set up companies before to work out side of London. Why do they suddenly see the need? guess that we probably will never know the answer to, what with their trustees being friends of the prime minister.


Have a look through for some previous outside of ?greater London and its surrounds? jobs in here. (Don?t be surprised if this web link disappears soon) seems to have run out of steam in 2005)

http://www.molas.org.uk/projects/annualReviews.asp

this is the type of product they can produce

http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/beach_eh_2008/downloads.cfm

for this kinda monies

http://alsf.defra.gov.uk/Default.aspx?Location=None&Module=AdminProject&FromSearch=Y&SearchType=B&ProjectID=1192&MarineTerrestialId=-1&DBId=1&CountyId=9&Action=View

Now I have a hat and plenty of old rope but just how do these jobs come about? and why?

I also got another whinge against anybody who is a unit and that is trolls wonderful ?total package?. These units carry so called ?specialists? or if you like the units have access to them. Now I don?t know whos what at the museum of London and there was some mention recently that some curators were being amalgamated into one but if I want (made to by the curators) my pot or metal finds identified I have to pay a specialist (if they are new I have to supply their qualifications, publication record and was once asked for a peer recommendation) a market rate which they often complain is not enough to keep them going, they are defiantly are not supported by our local ?museums?.

[Dinosaur]

Well said deano but to agree with troll - I would rather dig with people who have done single context planning even on a site where we are multi contexting. Its gets very frightening when you find yourself with muticontexters who have never single context planned. I find that they get very irate when you point out that they don’t know why they are doing what they are doing.

Rare case of me agreeing with Unit - but thats a product of the generation gap opening up amongst the digging crew that's been discussed somewhere on here before, the older lot who've had experience of the variations (for instance I quite liked digging boxes so lots of sections so you could actually figure out what the h**l the strat actually meant in PX, but apparently thats not allowed these days, standing baulks seem to be a thing of the past) and the younger crew who haven't been exposed to such things except in dusty tomes in the darker recesses of their university libraries

[vulpes]

are MoL still digging? Thought they got PCA to do their dirty work nowadays, a sort of PPI for archaeologists.

[GPStone]

You'd think that was the case wouldn't you but one looking at one particular charity unit's accounts (all online at the charity commission) seem to be suggesting that they have been making a loss every year for the past three or possible four years. A private commercial company couldn't do that without either the director's sticking their own money in to keep it going or managing to get a loan to cover it, so how do they do it? Are their trustees making up the not inconsiderable shortfall out of their own pockets? That to me seems like an unfair advantage.

No, on all counts. They're the same as you or I or any other kind of commercial company (with charitable status or not). They'll have an overdraft arrangement which right now they'll probably be taking full advantage of. While they have the access to credit provision they are as solvent as all the other companies that are currently having to operate on that basis. Accounts are interesting too. Quite a few of the larger companies/charities got well and truly flummoxed over the last financial year as a result of the new pensions regulations, and those that have sizeable pensions defecits got blown out of the water leading to the appearance of losses, regardless of their overal operating performance. That led to a few big deals falling apart and possibly contributed to some job losses (in a roundabout way) along with everything else, but wasn't something which could be foreseen.

I know relatively little about MoLA or MetroMoLA, but with regard to the way the big charities are set up, it isn't any different to normal non-charitable companies. Rather than being able to get away with something, however, they actually have extra-layers of regulations they have to comply to and which their accountants, their auditors and the charities commision keep track on, as well as having trustees overseeing things and being directly liable to the debts of the company should it trade as insolvent. Its not the charities you have to keep an eye on when it comes to trading and financial misdeeds as they have so much more regulatory tape, hoops and obligations to jump through and would get caught out pretty damn quickly, unless you believe a numerous and expansive range of accountancy professionals and various other professional monitoring types are guilty of simultaneously and independently turning a blind-eye and rich people are willing to put their own money on the line......oh, hang on......

[GPStone]

......and I've got to agree that the ability to do single-context planning as well as everything else is a great asset, if something of a dying art in some quarters. The advice I was given when I started was, "Now then lad! Make sure you dig in as many places and with as big a range of periods as you can get your paws on.......and make sure you get a healthy dose of deep strat experience, its worth it!" I'd stand by that still, if any young diggers can get a job in the first place.

[Unitof1]

gpstone care to name a "No, on all counts. They're the same as you or I or any other kind of commercial company " charity/unit, possibly one close to your home, so that we can contemplate its sameness to the real world of diggging. PS I suspect that on grounds of box sections/pension you must be a least 20 years older than me

[GPStone]

gpstone care to name a "No, on all counts. They're the same as you or I or any other kind of commercial company " charity/unit, possibly one close to your home, so that we can contemplate its sameness to the real world of diggging. PS I suspect that on grounds of box sections/pension you must be a least 20 years older than me

I think you're thinking of Dinosaur when it comes to box sections, Unit.

As for who the regulations apply to, if a company also has charitable status and is organised in that way (take Wessex or Oxford if you want an example) it is subject to the same rules and regulations. Not only this, the accounts will be to some extent published and accessible through the charities commission, although they can be organised as with any accounts to be somewhat opaque. As well as being audited, many large developers/clients will often expect to be allowed to inspect a company's accounts as part of the tenders process or as part of the contract phase in order to establish whether the contractor can carry any financial risk inherent in the project, which essentially acts as a further vote of financial confidence. If a large archaeological business isn't financially solvent, it often wouldn't be able to get the larger work in the first place which has until recently sustained a lot of the larger firms.

All that aside and like I said before, I don't have direct experience of MoLA or its more recent subsidiaries so can't speak about that situation specifically. But this is all fairly standard stuff. I assume your experience is different.......