26th November 2011, 04:21 PM
kevin wooldridge Wrote:I think to be fair to Ken Whittaker he does preface his contribution with the caveat that he is only suggesting a rate that matches archaeological salaries with those of comparable industries.....
...whilst I think there is some scope for variation of salaries around a mean figure I am a little surprised that no-one so far has suggested that the 'average' UK archaeological wage shouldn't at least equal the average UK wage i.e ?30,800 per year. That of course means if you have a lot of practitioners earning below that level, there must be a minority earning some way above it to make the law of averages work. If you took as a rough estimate that there are c4000 archaeologists at work in the UK,and say 2000 of those are on ?20,000 and 1000 are on ?25000, the remaining thousand would have to be earning close to ?60,000 a year just to make the average archaeology wage the same as the average UK wage.
So I am not so sure that Ken's figures are too far off what ought to be a reasonable aim for the profession. That is a dignity wage that equals the UK average wage. (I am of course talking fantasy aspiration here.....)
Comparable industry is quite a relative term though.
Also, how are the average national salaries worked out? I know graduates earning equally crap wages, but at the same time others earning massive amounts. So if it is just a mean amount it might be a bit meaningless.