11th March 2009, 09:50 PM
I've been thinking about the Brave New World for some time. In the last five years there's been a noticable reduction in the man hours required in survey and associated graphics. The increase in online resources and fat client data processing tools have vastly improved the turn around time of DBAs and writing up. The next step seems to me that we need to get smarter in how we target excavation. And this means looking at the theory side of things again. I think there's alot to me learnt (not whole sale lifted, mind) from other digging traditions. We particularly lag behind the North Americans in developing exacavation strategy as a discipline.
The thing that concerns me is that if the pool of archaeologists gets too small then we will have to return to using labourers when a large human input is required. I would not like to see a similar situation to Ireland with a G.O. class emerging. In my very strong opinion who-so-ever is carrying out the work must be able to recognise if not the evidence then anomolies to be flagged up. Because technology is decreasing the amount of personnel required at the top end the bottleneck will yet narrower.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I agree with Kevin. Now is the time to start developing a new professional infrastructure.
The thing that concerns me is that if the pool of archaeologists gets too small then we will have to return to using labourers when a large human input is required. I would not like to see a similar situation to Ireland with a G.O. class emerging. In my very strong opinion who-so-ever is carrying out the work must be able to recognise if not the evidence then anomolies to be flagged up. Because technology is decreasing the amount of personnel required at the top end the bottleneck will yet narrower.
I'm not sure what the answer is. I agree with Kevin. Now is the time to start developing a new professional infrastructure.