EDITORIAL - Antiquity. the state of the next generation - Martin Carver

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The most important thing for any profession is to ensure that new young talent has access to a career and that the career has a structure in which creativity is rewarded. In Britain, we have done next to nothing in this regard—and it would be difficult to say who has been the more feckless—the directors of large companies or the heads of archaeology departments in universities. The new lecturers are drawn in principle from the cohort of doctoral students, implying that the PhD is intended to provide an apprenticeship. Accordingly it has been streamlined:instead of spending twenty years on an enormous topic, the student spends three years on something more manageable, a course or programme likely to provide a useful experience and destined for expeditious completion. Strangely however, the required output remains the same: a book-length treatise

it stricks me that Carver did not have a career structure let alone one based on a PhD. Be quite interesting to work out his pension. He seems to do well to pick on heads of large companies and heads of archaeology departments with suggesting feckinglessness when he was head amateur of probably all fecklessness and pension grabbing activity over the life time of that crap public servant careea organisation known as the ifa but no mention here hay

but here is the real ifa sign of run by lost plot

Consider the case of large flat sites that require excavation in area. The effective method, as we have known for decades, requires definition of a horizon by lines of trowellers, viewed from a tower. There isn’t a better way of doing this, but the practice was discontinued because it didn’t suit the economics of archaeological firms; they prefer to deploy antiquated two-man trenches or test pits in which little will be seen, but nobody will realise it

[SIZE=3] lets"we" consider the case of large flat sites that require excavation in area. Lets look up standards and guidence on how to establish what is a large flat site that requires excavation in area. Probably be needing some form of evaluation. Wont bother refereing to the ify guidences because they were created by somebody who says that two man trenches are antiquated (and troweling lines are not?) and in which little will be seen but nobody will realise it which is the same as saying the guideneces which they created are wrong. Ha ha yes we have had decades of it.[/SIZE]