18th July 2011, 10:32 PM
Wax Wrote:I think the real problem is that the general public (and I include the media) have absolutely no idea how archaeology in the UK works. Even the amateurs have little if any knowledge of commercial archaeology. This leads to the misconception that most archaeology that goes on is research and is done for the sake of the archaeologists not as a legal requirement necessary to protect our heritage.
Not just the general public and local societies, I know a number of fairly senior academics who seem to have only the very vaguest understanding of how commercial archaeological fieldwork comes about. They view research excavation as the be-all and end-all of archaeology.
As regards the media, almost every story relating to an archaeological discovery ahead of a development is written to emphasise the unexpected nature of the find, and how the archaeologists were called in by the developer in response to it. This is despite the fact that most discoveries are made as part of a pre-development phase of fieldwork on the site, often with the specific aim of recording a site whose existence was already known, and that it's usually closely timetabled into the programme of work. This seems to be because the minutiae of planning conditions doesn't make for good copy - I've explained to a number of journalists that the archaeologists were already on site prior to a discovery being made because it was a condition of planning consent, but you can see their eyes glaze over (and why wouldn't they, it's not a particularly interesting subject, though I've always thought journalists should be interested in ensuring the accuracy of their reporting).
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum