Corporate archaeology: Is it the future or is it the past?

[Marcus Brody]

And the small scale independents will always be able to pick up enough crumbs to keep going as long as theres an active curator slapping conditions on

If you're looking for a conspiracy, I'd say that this is it. There have been a number of stories recently about Councils shutting or downsizing their archaeology services and laying off staff, all under the guise of austerity or the need to streamline the planning process to facilitate a construction-led recovery. It's open to interpretation how much this is individual Councils reaching similar solutions when faced with similar problems and how much it's part of a campaign-by-stealth to remove archaeology from being a significant issue in the planning process, but in my opinion it's the single move with the potential to have the greatest impact on commercial archaeology and the number of archaeologists in the country.

I know Unitof1 disagrees with this, but my opinion is that if there were no curators asking for planning conditions, the number of archaeological interventions resulting from planning applications would fall off a cliff, as would the number of archaeologists and archaeology companies, while the amount of archaeology lost to development would increase. I know that people in the commercial sector who are threatened with job losses might say 'well, why should I be worried about a few cosseted Council desk-jockeys losing their gold-plated pensions when I'm about to be made redundant too', but this seems to me a very clear example where job cuts in the public sector will have a significant impact on employment in the private sector (and before any of the curators on here write back, I'm well aware that most Council pensions require a contribution from the individual, that the average pension is not particularly high, and that they can hardly be described as gold plated). I'm always concerned when I hear about Councils cutting their archaeology service because I think that it'll have a knock-on effect on the amount of work about.