Watching the Curator

[Marcus Brody]

Now as I was saying - This is just to see if this is widespread. --- often it would be a great idea to have an inhouse archaeology unit able to do works.

For Fife, it should be noted that other companies do indeed work there. so it is not closed. --- I am hearing of another possible in Essex. but will find out more.

I don't have any specific knowledge of this case, but I'd generally be fairly cautious about accepting everything that's written in a local paper as true, as my experience has been that they're often not hugely conscientious about facts relating to exactly why archaeological work is taking place, who's doing it and why (witness the many stories about developers unexpectedly finding something on their site and calling in archaeologists because, hey, they're decent guys who really care about heritage, when in fact the archaeologists were on site from the start because the planning department told the developer that they had to be there, and the developer moaned about it every step of the way).

As far as I'm aware, Douglas Spiers is Fife Council's only in-house archaeologist, so I'd assume that any other archaeologists on site are contractors, and that this distinction has somehow been lost in the newspaper article. It may have been confused because the council is ultimately the developer on this project, so the contractor would technically be working for the Council, with Douglas Spiers being identified as being in charge because he's the employer's own archaeologist, who has set the scope of the work, and is overseeing it for the Council. There's nothing on the Fife Council Archaeology Unit's website to indicate that they actually undertake digging work, and if they did, I'd expect them to advertise it in some way. I agree with the general thrust of the thread, that curators shouldn't undertake fieldwork in competition with contractors, particularly if there's no-one else in a position to hold them accountable if their work is not up to standard, but I'm not convinced that this is an example of it.