We, professional and academic archaeologists, wish to endorse the call for a People’s Assembly Against Austerity (PAAA) at Central Hall Westminster on 22 June this year. We congratulate the lead signatories who launched this call in a letter to The Guardian in February.
With our museums, universities, and heritage services facing cuts, with unemployment and poverty a common experience among archaeologists, we fully support the aim of building a mass campaign against austerity and privatisation. We need a radical alternative based on investment for jobs, homes, public services, and a green transition.
We hope that the PAAA will bring together thousands of trade unionists, students, political activists, anti-cuts campaigners, minority groups, and others determined to defend our society against the effects of a crisis caused by the bankers, the rich, and the casino-economy they engineered.
The assembly will provide a national forum for anti-austerity opinion, which, while increasingly widespread, is barely represented in Parliament and the mainstream media. It could also provide a launch-pad for the wave of protests, strikes, occupations, and mass resistance – nationally and internationally – that we are going to need to defend our jobs, incomes, public services, and heritage in the years ahead.
Dr Umberto Albarella, Senior Lecturer in Archaeozoology, Sheffield University
Dr Maria Emanuela Alberti, IEF Marie-Curie Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Sheffield University
Caitlin McCall, Editor, Current World Archaeology
Professor Emeritus John Collis, Sheffield University
Dr Nadia Durrani, independent archaeologist
Dr Neil Faulkner, Research Fellow, Bristol University
Dr Helen Geake, National Finds Advisor, Portable Antiquities Scheme, Cambridge University, and Time Team
Dr Matthew Hobson, Research Fellow, Leicester University
Professor David Mattingly, Leicester University
Dr Gabriel Moshenska, Lecturer in Public Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology
Dr Rachel Pope, Director of Fieldwork and Lecturer in European Prehistory, Liverpool University
Dr Miles Russell, Senior Lecturer in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology and Director of Fieldwork, Bournemouth University
Lorna Watts-Rahtz, independent archaeologist