8th June 2011, 03:49 PM
gwyl Wrote:sorry to be so thick, but why would you want to dig on a commercial site unless it is to get a foot in the door of commercial archaeology; the pressures of time, conditions and often, even, the remains are not conducive to a rewarding experience if your interest is in having a bit of a poke...
I made exactly this point on a previous thread, that the benefits of being a local society or voluntary group is that you can pick a site you're interested in and work on that, with a reasonable expectation of finding archaeology, whereas a commercial contractor only gets to dig where there's development, where there's no certainty that there's archaeology present, and with all the usual constraints on time, conditions etc. So I don't think most evaluations or watching briefs would be swamped by volunteers.
However, there are occasional sites that are excavated under commercial conditions where there's a clear public interest, and where local groups would possibly be keen to have the opportunity to actually get involved. The site I mentioned previously, where volunteers were included, was a large Roman site in the centre of a town. It was in a very prominent location, received a lot of coverage, and was widely known as Roman. Therefore, there was already a local interest before the excavation started, and once we were on site, people would frequently stop at the fence for a chat about what we'd found. Within this group there was a subset of people who wanted to take this interest further, not because they wanted to become full-time archaeologists (many had other jobs or were retired), but because they were interested in the history of their town, knew about the significance of the site, and were aware that opportunities to work on such prime sites may only come around once in a generation. Fortunately, the company concerned was able to accommodate them on site. Some were brilliant and required almost no support, some (charitably) were probably a net drain on staff time, in that they needed more supervision than was gained in terms of the additional work they produced, but it was still a worthwhile exercise in terms of the goodwill it fostered with the wider community and with local amateur archaeologists in particular
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum