Archaeology - can you fix it?

[P Prentice]

I like to believe the true tale involves a beautiful princess, an epic sword battle hard won - and the quest finally thwarted by a unversity professor with halitosis.
Call me a romantic why don't you. . .

a regular hyperion in reality

[Wax]

Where I live and work the helpful NT archaeologist gives all the commercial work to one company without going through any fair and open tendering processes. Happy days for some.

You will find a lot of big organisations have prefered contractors they work with, the companies used might be offering things other than low costs. There are many advantages with working with tried and tested contractors who understand exactly what you want and need and deliver on time. Open tendering and going for lowest cost does not always deliver the goods.

[Dinosaur]

@ dinosaur, just curious about your contempt for academia, which is afterall the bedrock of any ology - were you slighted or cuckolded by any chance?

No problem with proper academics who actually contribute (a well-researched) something, the rest of us would be pretty much wasting our time without someone to occasionally pull it all together and see the bigger picture - I just think that a severe cull of the light-weights [and 100% of anyone who has ever been responsible for coining any '-ism' terms] is long overdue? And PhDs should be restricted to people who've actually contributed something new and useful...just check out the subjects many people get away with on the website of any of the Unis that publish them on-line...

[Dinosaur]

...actually I've got one here on my desk (published as a BAR) which appears, having set out at the beginning a series of laudable and well-thought-out aims, to fail to actually answer any of them - the author seems to have discovered halfway through that none of the dataset used actually showed anything useful, but unfortunately even that isn't stated in the painfully wooly 'conclusions'...poor

...some dead handy data in some of the tables though which I'm using for something completely different (and rather more valid), saved me several weekends in a library :face-approve:

[kevin wooldridge]

Whilst it might be considered fun to take the piss out of other peoples work (especially other peoples PhDs), we shouldn't be distracted from the fact that the results of our archaeological undertakings need to be synthesised and published. Nobody can claim that grey literature or descriptive reports in local journals is a satisfactory final product for our works.....so perhaps those critical of the results at the 'high end' of academia, might suggest where and how the results of our research should be disseminated....

[Dinosaur]

Perhaps a small percentage of commercial funding should be set aside for occasional published sythesis? [perhaps commissioned by HERs?]

I've seen a few valiant attempts in grey lit reports to achieve some wider discussion (have tried it myself), but what's the point when hardly anyone ever reads the things? A distressingly high proportion of 'academic' publication still largely ignores the ever-expanding grey lit universe, even where it's available on-line - the PhD referred to above used a highly selective dataset of a handful of lavishly-published cemeteries located within a huge study area, ignoring the doubtless several thousand 'grey lit' or smaller-published burials of a similar period within the same region. The highly selective nature of the small (and hence often internally conflicting) dataset effectively negated what could potentially have been an important piece of research. On similar lines, the Roman burial population from a small town around here regularly gets referenced in publications - although curiously only that part that was published in one monograph quite a few years back...have never seen a reference connecting them to the not insignificant number of other burials forming part of the same burial-complex that have been excavated in the decade or two since (and some of which are published, albeit only in 'minor' publications, the rest are fully available in grey lit format in the local HER if anyone ever bothered to look).

DBAs should in theory provide occasional up-to-the-minute 'local' syntheses, but unfortunately many (?most) of those are merely regurgitations of HER data and don't really contribute anything new

[Martin Locock]

There are Research Agendas for Scotland, Wales and parts of England that draw together all fieldwork in a rolling synthesis - these could be used more (and be contributed to more).

[Dinosaur]

They're sometimes terribly variable in content and level of detail (e.g. see the series of period ones by a variety of authors for West Yorkshire, which while generally pretty good definitely lack consistency) and I can think of one I've read that seemed to reflect purely the author's own personal research interest and frankly wasn't much use for anything else

Also, of course, they're research agendas, rather than in-depth analyses, so there's not many occasions I've actually managed to prise any useful archaeological data out of them

[Dinosaur]

...and I've certainly never been asked to contribute to one, they usually seem to get written by the same people who wrote everything that had come before (always seems to be the same limited pool of names), so the same stuff gets regurgitated complete with all the long-standing predjudices etc....

[Martin Locock]

I agree there are issues with the Research agendas (not the least of which is the need to revisit them regularly), but I suspect that when we call for more synthesis and dissemination this is the sort of thing we will see. I don't think synthesis is all that necessary - that was a wworkaround for the days when data was hard to loacte and interpret. These days it should be easy to update understanding by using HER info reflecting recent results in grey lit and publications. If HERs are not resouced well enough to deliver this in a timely fashion that's where I would focus money.