5th April 2011, 03:04 PM
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[SIZE=3]GPstone said-One difficulty with instigating the campaign may lie within the commercial sector.
Too right. The commercial sector can make very little effect on increasing the amount of development going on and it?s the amount of development which absolutely controls the commercial sector. I also don?t think that we are best lumped in the heritage industry
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[SIZE=3]?The CM&S Select Committee identified that heritage tourism alone contributes ?7.4 billion to the UK economy (?20.6 billion with multipliers such as suppliers).
If we stopped doing developer funded archaeology today would it make any difference to the heritage tourism industry? I don?t think that it would, or rather that it would not be measurable under the ?heritage? banner. The conflict of interest that we have would be to agree that yet more infrastructure needs to be built so that tourists can get from Heathrow to Stonehenge and onto Stratford on Avon. I agree?
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[SIZE=3]?The membership of the NT, EH, RSPB, CBA et al suggests an enormous support-base for heritage in the UK, albeit covered by a fragmented array of organisations.
Again I don?t think that field archaeologists come under the heritage banner. I think that if you put field archaeologists in a fire sale of heritage, people would vote to save tangible assets first, like a museum, a stately home where their ancestors used to wipe the arses of the ancestors of the current pupils at Eton, or a monument. Doing new archaeology is going to be head stuck in the sand and don?t we use vo;uenteers for that.
Right now we have threats to HERs which were once and in some places are still called SMRs. Thing is that in the good times the fundamentals of SMRs were never questioned. Yes Somebody came up with a name change, I suppose. ?Hay look we have lots of spare cash wouldn?t it be a good idea to change the name?. It used to be a few drawers of index cards, maybe some parish files and a bit of a library. There was a map cabinet which had 1930s ordnance survey scribbled with every county archaeologists (who used to work for the ordnance survey) redesigned number system. It was all stuff that should have been at and sometime was in the local museum. Then grey literature started and somehow this literature became an excuse for the SMRs existence in about early to mid nineties. Which is when it all turned into a bonanza for the established units and the civil servants. Now the HER is in a very expensive computer which needs to be fed electricity every day. This computer is run by a service company. In some cases the service companies also run the HER. And they have probably spotted that nobody uses it enough and that those that do only use it because they are made too and don?t really need it to do field work particularly when there is no field work about.
Problem now is that the museums couldn?t take the HERs as the museums were now not in the education industry (if that?s what the HER is for) the museums are in?..the heritage industry which as we know is nothing to do with us. Oh and the grey literature can be put on oasis. HER RIP
Nuclear power station next door. Yes please.
Reason: your past is my past