19th February 2009, 09:49 AM
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The unit I work for gets a reasonable amount of work through being on certain local authority lists, though I know of one local authority who declined to put us on their list because we are not based in their county or an adjacent county, even though our current premises are 200-300m from said adjacent county (where we do a lot of work), and we are well inside the pre 1974 county boundary!
I think this thread has to some degree answered my original question - there does seem to be some degree of randomness about the manner in which different county lists are organised, who is on them, whether there are certain units that get an immediate look-in, and various historical arrangements. It's no wonder archaeology is such a mess as a profession when something this basic is so varying from region to region. It might seem like a trifling matter, and why worry about it after all this time, but I believe it is fundamental issues like this that are holding the profession back. Either the work is opened up to a truely free market and monitored appropriately, i.e. anyone can work anywhere and there are no lists, but everyone has to demonstrate their capability to do the work prior to doing it, or each region has a very strict list of people they already know can do it, who are then effectively recommended. Would that work though I wonder? The former would be much harder for curators to deal with and would really rely on something like an RAO scheme and therefore need the IfA's involvement. It's the sort of thing I would like to see the IfA investigating.