28th September 2010, 11:46 AM
MW. The museums dont do anything with all of the commercial archives deposited with them. It seems to me that in the current set up it is some obscure development control requirement that the archives are deposited with them. Possibly a throw back to when archaeologists were also museum curators/DoE or ordnance survey archaeologists and who used to put their pet archives in the museum.
All the museums do is put up some pretence about what type box the grotty bits of post mod everything should be in and how the pot should be marked but that?s about it. I would like to see them justifying and pointing out in what way what ever is archived is vital important research material for some future research geniuses-some spotty undergrad dissertation once every fifty years?
Personally think that we should stop archiving anything commercial and that the museums should ?request? from us anything that they think they might want from reading the reports submitted. To get you attention you might like to pay us something for it. At the moment you have development control creating archives which nobody wants but they have absolutely no financial comeback for justifying the preservation.
Being a commercial archaeologist I don?t care what gets archived because it becomes a charge to the client. The only time I care is when I read things like Dinos ?site of national importance?. I think only nationally important if it?s a one day watching brief worth about ?375 which got turned into a five week cash cow extravaganza rather than a five week cash cow that got turned into a one day watching brief.
not much point putting it in the museum then
All the museums do is put up some pretence about what type box the grotty bits of post mod everything should be in and how the pot should be marked but that?s about it. I would like to see them justifying and pointing out in what way what ever is archived is vital important research material for some future research geniuses-some spotty undergrad dissertation once every fifty years?
Personally think that we should stop archiving anything commercial and that the museums should ?request? from us anything that they think they might want from reading the reports submitted. To get you attention you might like to pay us something for it. At the moment you have development control creating archives which nobody wants but they have absolutely no financial comeback for justifying the preservation.
Being a commercial archaeologist I don?t care what gets archived because it becomes a charge to the client. The only time I care is when I read things like Dinos ?site of national importance?. I think only nationally important if it?s a one day watching brief worth about ?375 which got turned into a five week cash cow extravaganza rather than a five week cash cow that got turned into a one day watching brief.
Quote:[SIZE=3]anyone's guess what they're part of or what date, there's not enough stratigraphic info to make sense of what is probably a really important pottery assemblage[/SIZE]
not much point putting it in the museum then
Reason: your past is my past