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+--- Thread: Is a decent specialist report a luxury? (/showthread.php?tid=4679)
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - P Prentice - 31st December 2012
redexile Wrote:They funded the initial setting up of some of them, but don't want to get involved with the on-line versions it seems from what people who've tried to get money for them have told me. I think they see it as not really their responsibility, which I can understand, and they're pretty much broke anyway, or at least the archaeology section is.curious - online dissemination facilities are popular ay the moment, there are lots getting funded and they are far from broke (this year)
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - kevin wooldridge - 31st December 2012
A one off Heritage Lottery grant would seem to be the answer to set the thing up (and a damn site more useful and cost effective than many other things they fund). It could perhaps be incorporated into an IfA bursary if any unit wants to take up the challenge and at the same time provide training for someone who might be interested in a career in database management....the £350 quid annual fee and maintenance costs could be generated through a relatively modest annual subscription to the service....perhaps 100 subscribers at £50 a year or an access fee for one-off users, should keep the thing ticking over......
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - redexile - 31st December 2012
kevin wooldridge Wrote:A one off Heritage Lottery grant would seem to be the answer to set the thing up (and a damn site more useful and cost effective than many other things they fund). It could perhaps be incorporated into an IfA bursary if any unit wants to take up the challenge and at the same time provide training for someone who might be interested in a career in database management....the £350 quid annual fee and maintenance costs could be generated through a relatively modest annual subscription to the service....perhaps 100 subscribers at £50 a year or an access fee for one-off users, should keep the thing ticking over......
Not sure the HLF would fund it - haven't had any dealings with them in a while, but my understanding is that they won't fund 'research' unless there's a heavy public involvement. While type-series would benefit the public, I suspect they'd see it as being of more benefit to 'professionals'. And I doubt you'd get an archaeological contractor to pay a sub to maintain a type-series when they won't pay a specialist to look at their pottery! This is why we have suggested a development levy - seems to be the most feasible way of making it happen.
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - redexile - 31st December 2012
BAJR Wrote:Small problem though...
http://www.medievalpottery.org.uk/occpap2.htm
Ah... I have to buy a copy for 4:50 - when it would be better to have it available to download. To be adopted, documents are better freely available and this makes them widely available.
A senior member of the MPRG committee has just confirmed to me that they will discuss making their Standards available as a free download at the January Council meeting
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - Kel - 31st December 2012
Good news Red. Nice work.
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - BAJR - 1st January 2013
Quote:A senior member of the MPRG committee has just confirmed to me that they will discuss making their Standards available as a free download at the January Council meeting
A big thumbs up to this! Thanks Red!
Am at your disposal for any help - distribution etc
What a good way to start the year!
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - Unitof1 - 1st January 2013
oh I need a licence now to dig and I have to use a non existant mandatory made up type series pottery guide lines which no body has authority over. I have to say that all of your argument clinching little anacdotal examples of misidentification have seemed to have missed out their contractual context. Whys that then?
Quote:the Staffordshire Hoard was mainly unstratified- sorry what archaeological contractual situation is this relevant to. from what I can see it was totally unstratified and they are still getting bits floating up to the surface which would suggest that no real attempt was ever made at excavation. I would shudder to call it archaeology. Did you put the term unstratified in to make it sound archaeological and that somewhere nearby there was some stratified archaeological context?
Quote:If it had been left to us/me, the size of the bones would have suggested a post-med cow and the site would merely have got a couple of sentences in the up-coming publication, along the lines of 'no significant archaeology found in these trenches', rather than spawning a dozen C14 dates and plans for a major up-coming excavation. I think maybe that specialist report was probably cost-effective in the long run?so you are saying that you got some up and comeing publication out of an evaluation (?) which is now spawning plans for a major excavation of an aurock burial site. Prey tell more as I suspect you are working for a council unit on a pet quarry site where you have a yearly budget and you split it up into doing a bit of evaluation followed by a bit of excavation no matter what the significance or worry about any archaeological compertition.
Quote:My personal recent favourite was a dig near a motte and bailey on the edge of a Roman town. The site supervisor fancied himself as a pot expert, and there he was on the cover of the local paper clutching a complete 'Saxo-Norman' pot and announcing to the world he'd found the (previously unlocated) bailey ditch. I got to look at the same pot a few weeks later (the finds manager smelled a rat) - it was Roman, and so was everything else in the feature. It was a Roman land boundary.was the "dig" an evaluation or excavation, what was the point of the "dig", where in the planning process was it. Its noticable that in this exacmple that it was a lowly "site supervisor" who presumably has been making these gaffes whilst working thier way up the greasy pole of the wonderful unit (presumably at a unit where the title archaeologist was extremly blurred) but which also has a finds manerger who exhiditing a similar level of competance to the lowly site super was able in the nick of time to smell rat and get a medieval pot specialist to spot that all the pot was Roman. What wonderful greasy poles from which to grease your palms. Now all we need is the romanists to get their two penith worth and get the operations manager in on it and then get a retraction put in the same local news paper. We will all be quids in. and we can still wonder if a roman land boundary may not be a saxon bailey or what the chances of complete roman pot being residual.
Quote:To give an example, someone sent me 6 sherds of med pottery from Reading yesterday, all unglazed, grey/brown and boring. One had a few bits of shell in it, popped it under the microscope, it's London fabric SSW, and the first time it's been found in Reading, altho it's turned up on a few other sites in Berks. Now, I doubt TV crews with be hammering on my door anytime soon, but it's another dot on the distribution map, and a tiny incremental advance in human knowledge. Or they could have given it to a digger and who'd have said '6 sherds of medieval pottery' instead, and saved themselves £10. This is what gets my back up, I think, it's ultimately tiny amounts of money that they're saving.My friend how about thinking that its tiny amounts of money that they havent got. I think that you should start looking at these sherds in the archaeological contractual setting. And by archaeollgical I mean digging sense. Did that identification have any affect on the contract out comes. Seems to me they probably dont and if so then if you are so concerned with distribution of fabrics then you should get at it through the archieve and in some more academic funded position. (I would also like to take the micheal out of anybody who thinks that they can easily differentiate fabrics around London as I believe that all come from the same deposits and even atomic absorption cannot differentiate them, shell or no meaningless shell).
really this thread should be entitled "Is a decent evaluation specialist report a luxury or if its an excavation specialist report it is too late to worry about decency as any further speculation after the money has run out should be academic."
Lets try again -name me one single pot specialist in a museum. I was hopeing I would get an answer so that I could send all my pot to them and get them identified for free. Ho a bit like sending finds to the PAS, ho sorry I am not allowed to use them either but them they dont realy have any responsiblity for the museums do they. So where are you going to keep the bloody pointless typologies or is that type series? We could turn this into thread entitled "Museums dont realy exist particularly for finds specialists so the finds specialists wonder around making no sense at all".
Never understode why the new year wasnt the day after the winter solstice. I bet I can find a specialist to give me an answer but I bet they will want a living out of it.
Happy New year.
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - BAJR - 1st January 2013
Hate to say it. but there are fair points in there. though, perhaps more in tune with where archaeology is now, than where it should be.
Quote:So where are you going to keep the bloody pointless typologies or is that type series?
that is partly waht teh interweb is for.
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - Unitof1 - 1st January 2013
not sure I made any points, the web is mostly for porn and selling things, whos paying for this pointless typology and whats in it for them and whos going to use it against anybody who wants to dig? Where archaeology is now is that we still have so called curators who think that commercial units should have a finds manager pot specialists site supervisors and all the parafinalias of council unit charity subsidy. For anybody wanting a pot type series its just another attempt to say that HERs should be compulasary if not a statutory reason to justify their jobs. I think that people who want to be pot specialists should not be bleating at the doors of field archaeologists but at the museum doors. Basically they should be part of the "curation" of the collections-the proper use of the word curation, not that used by those unelected public servants who sometimes call themselves county archaeologists amoungst other positions. Now until museums want to pay me for my archieve I am not sure that I can take them very seriously either....
Is a decent specialist report a luxury? - BAJR - 1st January 2013
But how then do you collate your own resource, or do you just say... I found pot. deal with it Mr/Mrs Museum... and close the door on the way out.
I am no specialist.