BAJR 12 Predictions for the next ten years

[BAJR]

1. Public Archaeology will become commercial.

Looking to the future, the commercial companies will decide that the public purse will open to the 'well-being' generation. Each town and village will soon have its own excavation and project until every part of our sceptred isle is one massive project.

The public will then be edged out of being involved in community excavations, due to health and safety concerns and eventually only professionals with the appropriate credentials will be allowed on a community site. Membership of the IfA or relevant body will become a requirement - and amateurs will have to apply for professional amateur status.

However, in 2016, an act will be created that requires the stripping of the entire topsoil layer of the UK to ensure that no development is held up by temporal contamination, and by 2017, archaeological companies are assigned enforced labour from communities to achieve this, resulting in what are euphemisticly called 'Field Schools'. By the end of 2020 we have a full record of every site in the whole of the UK and then all retire to Barbados. :face-huh:

[Maggie]

Barbados eh... We will soon get bored of sitting on the beach and sipping cocktails and we then start up the same thing there, thus we will have to move back to the Isle of Wight which was missed the first time around.

[trowelfodder]

2. Archaeology will suffer a catestrophic skills shortage

3. Archaeologists will finally wake up and unionise, embark on a huge awareness raising campaign so that i will no longer have to smile through gritted teeth and explain that time team could not do my 2month evaluation in 3 days, no i an not a student, no i am not a volunteer, and yes it does annoy me that you get paid me more than me to drive a machine after i spent years in university (although fair play to you you do an ace job and make my life loads easier than digging the whole site by hand) }

[GnomeKing]

2b. (but it will be nearly to late and hardly anybody will notice...)