8th November 2010, 01:39 PM
This is situation is very economy dependant. Maybe there are some short memories out there? It was not that long ago before the recession that there were not enough field archaeologists coming out of university and major units were forced to employ geology grads and others if they got unexpected projects. With various levels of disaster. A guy I worked with on a dig had got his first job with a contractor having had two weeks on a training dig and having just finished his A levels. He went on to do an archaeology degree and worked each summer, all summer as a commercial digger for a different contractor. When he left uni as a v.good archaeologist with nearly 2 years digging experience he was only attracted back into the field for a short time because the conditions were so unappealing compared to other options that had opened up to him.
It has never been a necessity to have a degree in archaeology to work as a field archaeologist, it has always been necessary to make and use contacts and keep your ear on the ground to learn who is hiring and firing and what their like to work for. If the quality of graduates is a problem now - and for the last 10 years or so there have been more archaeology students than ever before both ggod and not so good - it is because commercial archaeology is incapable of attracting/recognising the better students and cannot hang on to many of those who do get involved. Pay more, train better investing in a team and treat staff like the asset they are - put some away for a rainy day, or when it stops raining there maybe none left, some companies do do this. Others are a bit complacent becasue of the high turnover of unjaded new gradautes keen to dig who stay for a few years and move on, jaded wrinked and with poorer knees than when they started. Not training people and simply tapping back into this gradaute pool is to explot willingness over experiance and is a very poor proffessional practice leading to a place where we have lots of keen and no experiance, a situation which we may be faced with in the future - the skills drain that has been identified before, and a place where we have been before as a proffession too.
Equally many of the academics training students are, as the thread suggests, the same ones who were in post when the professional field archaeologists, also commenting, were trained. The quality is exactly the same as the people are the same - the very few younger academics who have managed to find university positions have either had no digging experiance to speek of or quite often have had to move freely between both commercial and academic archaeology in order to supplement both carriers. So the future may be brighter than it seems. If thouse with experiance are able to set up their own projects the training they will provide will be closer to commercial recording systems than old pre ppg 16 academic ones. If commercail archaeolgists still have time to record things.
It is also not true that training projects will go with Uni fees - it creates a competitive market some uni's will go down that line, others will impose digging as a major element of the degree and attract students by doing more, and doing it better than before. Some deptments will go bust but that does not mean quality will go it might actuly distill what is there into a smaller pot and force univeristies to free up more of their funds to diversify their degrees. You knever know.
The only thing I know is that these debates were here in the 1990s when I studied, and will proably still be raging in 15 years time. The people who did best got as much experiacne as they could with whoever they could, commercial, academic, over seas or self created no matter. The ones that became jaded fast left fast. But if you want to dig there is always way to make it happen but never expect someone else to do it for you.
It has never been a necessity to have a degree in archaeology to work as a field archaeologist, it has always been necessary to make and use contacts and keep your ear on the ground to learn who is hiring and firing and what their like to work for. If the quality of graduates is a problem now - and for the last 10 years or so there have been more archaeology students than ever before both ggod and not so good - it is because commercial archaeology is incapable of attracting/recognising the better students and cannot hang on to many of those who do get involved. Pay more, train better investing in a team and treat staff like the asset they are - put some away for a rainy day, or when it stops raining there maybe none left, some companies do do this. Others are a bit complacent becasue of the high turnover of unjaded new gradautes keen to dig who stay for a few years and move on, jaded wrinked and with poorer knees than when they started. Not training people and simply tapping back into this gradaute pool is to explot willingness over experiance and is a very poor proffessional practice leading to a place where we have lots of keen and no experiance, a situation which we may be faced with in the future - the skills drain that has been identified before, and a place where we have been before as a proffession too.
Equally many of the academics training students are, as the thread suggests, the same ones who were in post when the professional field archaeologists, also commenting, were trained. The quality is exactly the same as the people are the same - the very few younger academics who have managed to find university positions have either had no digging experiance to speek of or quite often have had to move freely between both commercial and academic archaeology in order to supplement both carriers. So the future may be brighter than it seems. If thouse with experiance are able to set up their own projects the training they will provide will be closer to commercial recording systems than old pre ppg 16 academic ones. If commercail archaeolgists still have time to record things.
It is also not true that training projects will go with Uni fees - it creates a competitive market some uni's will go down that line, others will impose digging as a major element of the degree and attract students by doing more, and doing it better than before. Some deptments will go bust but that does not mean quality will go it might actuly distill what is there into a smaller pot and force univeristies to free up more of their funds to diversify their degrees. You knever know.
The only thing I know is that these debates were here in the 1990s when I studied, and will proably still be raging in 15 years time. The people who did best got as much experiacne as they could with whoever they could, commercial, academic, over seas or self created no matter. The ones that became jaded fast left fast. But if you want to dig there is always way to make it happen but never expect someone else to do it for you.