3rd May 2005, 04:46 PM
Ok, you have it there. The director is the only person on site who has to be licenced. Supervisors, assistants, g.o.'s are not required to be licenced. (Out of interest, how would you regulate that?)
And what you suggest is a nightmare scenario, which does happen, though quite rarely. The one thing I do stress is that there is almost always some form of preliminary report, it is generally the extended report incorporating full specialist findings which fall foul of the commercial pressures to keep digging.
As yet, it is the individual who is regulated, there is talk of transferring it to the company rather than the individual director to allow more flexibility in fulfilling the licence, (so that say if the director gets sick or for whatever reason cannot dig the site, another licenced archaeologist wihtin the company can take over the licence without the rigmarole which currently is needed). But what with Duchas being disbanded and the government being less than sympathetic to archaeology at the moment, it seems to have been put to the side for the moment, or at least, out of the public arena.
so to answer your question, there are no controls on the "trade" as such rather than the individual.
In my experience so far, the directors who are still directing after 5 years are still here because they are good at what they do, and do care enough about the archaeology and their own reputations to make sure that they do the best they can. it's not ideal, but in a survey carried out on incomplete licences the biggest culprit by far was in the research world, the Museum, not the commercial archeologists (though that's not saying that some of them don't have a bad track record either). The pressure put on commercial directors to keep digging means that by and large they do get reports in so they can keep getting their licences and keep earning money, and so the cycle continues.
And what you suggest is a nightmare scenario, which does happen, though quite rarely. The one thing I do stress is that there is almost always some form of preliminary report, it is generally the extended report incorporating full specialist findings which fall foul of the commercial pressures to keep digging.
As yet, it is the individual who is regulated, there is talk of transferring it to the company rather than the individual director to allow more flexibility in fulfilling the licence, (so that say if the director gets sick or for whatever reason cannot dig the site, another licenced archaeologist wihtin the company can take over the licence without the rigmarole which currently is needed). But what with Duchas being disbanded and the government being less than sympathetic to archaeology at the moment, it seems to have been put to the side for the moment, or at least, out of the public arena.
so to answer your question, there are no controls on the "trade" as such rather than the individual.
In my experience so far, the directors who are still directing after 5 years are still here because they are good at what they do, and do care enough about the archaeology and their own reputations to make sure that they do the best they can. it's not ideal, but in a survey carried out on incomplete licences the biggest culprit by far was in the research world, the Museum, not the commercial archeologists (though that's not saying that some of them don't have a bad track record either). The pressure put on commercial directors to keep digging means that by and large they do get reports in so they can keep getting their licences and keep earning money, and so the cycle continues.