Wiltshire Heritage Museum has no more room for storage.

[Martin Locock]

If you want to focus on evaluation being inexpensive - it depends what you are comparing it to. It is clear from the context that evaluation is inexpensive in comparison to excavation, and perhaps in comparison to the other costs of development. I don't believe that "inexpensive" is misapplied, even if the actual costs may rise to several thousand pounds for a site which might have 100 houses built on it, each selling for £100k. I

I think museums should be prepared to take material that they think is worth preserving, and should perhaps be open to persuasion by professionals seeking to fulfill their legal and moral responsibilities where there is borderline material. Their definition may be constrained by the resources they have to deal with the material. In my view it is up to museums to decide what they should take or keep - it is our job to offer it.

[Unitof1]

I think museums should be prepared to take material that they think is worth preserving, and should perhaps be open to persuasion by professionals seeking to fulfill their legal and moral responsibilities where there is borderline material.

as we have seen the wiltshire museum though it wise to prepare for 200 boxes-just what level should they be prepaired to.

professionals seeking to fulfill their legal and moral responsibilities where there is borderline material.

As far as I understand it the material apart from treasure starts off as the property of the landowner. That a brief appears to coerce the landowner to hand over that material I dont see as legal. I find it quite incredible the collective rip off of the landowner or more importantly the lack of responibility that it engenders in the landowners particularly the public sector ones.

As to my morals if I could get more for the material from a different source, any source I should take it. The system we seem to be trying to fight for seems to allow us to get away with dumping it at a museum and doing nothing more with the material we archaeologists have created

[GnomeKing]

""Archives should be the responsibility of the client"" - er no. Clearly that is madness.


Archives should be for the public good, and commercial contracts should be about that. ... As should the IFA Code...

If a a development is subject to planning conditions, then the archives must be public - an archaeologists position as a member of the IFA should come before any clients desire for non-public archives relating to a public planning decision.

Archives are very clearly the responsibility of the commercial archaeological unit producing them - public services will of course offer opinion and guidance on material to retain.....but YOU doing the fieldwork and post-ex are supposed to be bloody experts yourselves! > why is materiel often so badly thought through and organized? Why are you still collecting too much crap with no reserch potential (often directly because your own poor records and investigative standards). Not enough good stuff that is useable >>> none of this helps, especially when council services are so massively underfunded.

Underfunding is the key problem here - as Kevin points out, Wiltshire has plenty of space...(and a world heritage site F[SIZE=1]FS[/SIZE])
However: Companies have been neglecting archives for years - the whole issue has been allowed to backlog right across the sector.

What is to be done?:

There should be clear contractual obligations for commercial companies to follow through on their projects. A company should effectively be bankrupt before a council accepts an incomplete commercial archive, or one which clearly has not followed some kind of researched strategy.

The IFA urgently needs to pull its finger-out and help address the quality of archives being deposited : quality and coherence of records, quality and rational of assemblages formed, > is the right material being retained? is there a research framework the material can address?

Individuals from all levels (ie diggers to shiny-arsed-scribblers) need to stop the ""i don't care - i am just going to put it in a bag/file for somebody else to deal with"" attitude. Take the time to educate yourself if necessary.

Why should our tax money subsidize profits for private executives who have not dealt with this issue?

""In my view it is up to museums to decide what they should take or keep - it is our job to offer it."" - er no. Utter Rubbish.

a museum and a professional organization should pretty much coincide in their valuation of the material and archives - that is assuming the museum has the necessary archaeological expertise (which need not be the case).
However, it is an absolute given that the professional archaeological company should have all the necessary expertise to find out about the value of the material they have been payed to collect!!!

Ps ML: persuaded by professionals...and...up to museums themselves ... are absurdly contradictory sentiments in relation to a productive way forward. that is impressive for the same paragraph...is there another point you are trying to make?

[Dinosaur]

Good one :face-approve: - I'm with you

[Unitof1]

about as bad as it gets Gnomeking

Archives should be for the public good, and commercial contracts should be about that. ... As should the IFA Code...

If a a development is subject to planning conditions, then the archives must be public - an archaeologists position as a member of the IFA should come before any clients desire for non-public archives relating to a public planning decision.

Presumably you are a public servant because thats all that your paradaim justifies and as we can see they dont work without constant funding which we dont have. I dont see that the publicness of a planning permission results in the archive becoming public. Its a bit like saying if you want planning permission the land becomes public. You have no basis in law. Pretty cloud cookuo. As for what is good for the public just what do you mean by that -a soil sample from each context deep frozen and kept at the bottom of a mine embeded in granite. The other thing that I think that you will find is that museums arnt there for the good of the public either. This particular one is a public limited company. It has assests which it does not declare when it should so that we can sell them to the good of the chinies public if they so want and we think that it might be to the good of the wonderrous public.

oh and you want me to dig it up for free and then give it to these museums for free to call myself a archaeologist. I rather becalled a metal deterctorist.

[GnomeKing]

No, No and No.

funding? funding!! - where do our taxes go?.... not i assure you to cloud cock-oo land (unless we are ""peace keeping there too.., or bailing them out,...or simply pissing it away in commercialized self-vanity projects)

A world we now can not help but see is full of Incompetents, Liars, Corruption,(... and worst of all Lobbyists!) with pervasive forms of power in commerce and government.

THIS is the reality of the world in which archaeology is done - and no, i am not satisfied with that.
Dont attack me Uo1 - look at the overall picture.

If a matter has gone through a planning process, it de facto becomes a matter of public record simply because the descions and evidences used by public servants are subject in various ways to scrutiny. [--- your comment about the land itself is truly daft, though conceptually interesting----]

More precisely - most projects are done with explicit understanding that records etc will be made public...non?oui?...

BAJR - please feel free to remove this post and the daft one it is response too - i think it obscures the serious pionts i was trying to make -

eg ""The other thing that I think that you will find is that museums arnt there for the good of the public either.""" oh.ok then. i must have missed something important.......

also what is ""chinies public"" and do i need to be afraid?


cheers Uo1 - BTW since when was metal detectorist a term of abuse? i work very productively with metal detectorists; and would rather be called one of them, than an Ass.

please post this message to Uo1, if both are sensibly deleted.

[Unitof1]

our taxes go to pay public servants to run the country. The problem is that the public servants then think up ways of running the country which cannot be afforded by the country particularly people in the future. Some of the problems is that once they thought that doing archaeology was something that was for the good of the people but they also thought that it was such a good idea that only they should do it. They decided that they should have muesueums the problem though was how many, how big and where to put them as well as the little problem of what were they for and what should they have in them. For a very short time in history this cosy little world existed until it started to unravel bit by bit. The first to go was archaeologists directly working for the council as this was very expensive for pensions. They said archaeologists must be commercial. This is like saying that we must buy and sell. You seem to want me to give and give. Now I work for landowners although you like to call the developers and as landowners apart from very dubious laws about treasure they own the archaeology on their land and there is not a single law in this land that I know of which says that they must give up their archaeology to the good of the public particularly the town and country plannings act which barely mentions archaeology. Sorry but please where is the serious point that you were trying to make, was it that I should tell little old ladies that the archaeology on their land does not belong to them beecause if it is true and if its goibng to cost them money I dont see why they should give a fig about it and probably just encourage they to do things to the land such as subsoil it which thwy are allowed to do friend

[GnomeKing]

you are an idiot - tell the old ladies it is OUR heritage - pls thnk!

you seem to be proud of being an archaeological privateer for old ladies who own lots land. well done.

Now if you dont mind, some of us up here in cookoo land are rather busy trying to think of a better future for our descendents.

SO PLEASE DO SHUT UP

BAJR please remove these daft posts (including mine) as mentioned above - if you think they are distracting that is

[Unitof1]

OUR heritage-care to tell me where I can find this in law or even what you care to call heritage. This OUR is that include the scots and irish and exclude the yorkists. What happens every time the boundaries change. How much money are the rich people who do archaeology going to demand the poor people with sick children should go without to keep tns of 19th century cbm in store without any chance that anybody has ever asked to see it and if they do I bet they would not want to pay a penny to do so, in fact they probably would want to be paid for it. This wiltshire company issue their accounts next month. When they go bust what should WE do?

[GnomeKing]

i am not your enemy - you are mis-venting.

OUR as in shared heritage -

as i say more rational decisions need to be taken regarding some collections - commercial companies should be expected to have already thought a lot about it, even if they don't make final decisions.

I have said before that De-accessioning needs serious thought - equally submissions should be considered in turns of their overall potentials > i agree no more cbm needed ! > or tile > many low grade ubiquitous and documented sherds could also go > as could some bone assemblages > sadly some written archival material is so generic it could simply be disposed of and a card index entry kept!
SO, much could go > BUT only to make room for well researched archaeological material of value (something which goes back to initial excavation decisions...)

BUT,
PLEASE,
spare us the Little Timmy line >>> the door for that complaint lies elsewhere...(with a 10 on it).


@MODERATORS : pls delete all this rubbish!!!!