you cant sell what nobody wants

[P Prentice]

if our product is so poor that we cant sell it, how do we ensure we get paid adequately to do archaeology?

[VGC]

Do we need another thread on this?

However, if that's your feeling then you need to make the product better, so that people buy into it. Why are the folk who carry out other site investigations get paid more than us?

Do we fail to highlight that archaeology can be everywhere and we still don't know it all. That once it's gone, it's gone and we're not getting it back. That we lose knowledge of the past, which in cases where we've recovered the knowledge, is contributing to a changing in the understanding of the past. How do we do this though? Should the IfA produces documents to be circulated to all developers/builders/planners etc.? Will that have any impact at all.

One of the biggest contributions to low pay is the undercutting carried out by arch. units on each other when tendering. If we can get a proper baseline figure in play and everyone sticks to it, then those contracting units have no choice but to pay better. Will that happen though?

[kevin wooldridge]

if our product is so poor that we cant sell it, how do we ensure we get paid adequately to do archaeology?

In the vast majority of cases our product is very good......I don't have a practical answer to the question of pay, but suspect that franchising geographic areas to super-units and limiting the extent of competition would have an effect. A suggestion originally made by the All Party Parliamentary Archaeology group over 10 years ago incidentally, but never acted upon....

[Jack]

You can get anyone to buy anything if you pay a marketing company enough money to ram it down people's throats.......just look at macdonalds! }

[Dinosaur]

Find more shiny stuff?

[P Prentice]

In the vast majority of cases our product is very good.........

is it though? good for whom? the vast majority of planning related projects remain invisible.
i suspect the answer may lie closer to jacks macdonalds model. in business you do market research and you pay people to sell it etc etc. in our arrogance we all think what we do is valuable and meaningful but for most people we are a fringe interest group only marginally less annoying to developers than bats and newts.

[Marc Berger]

our product is so poor that we cant sell it

thing is Prentice/jack/kev is when did you ever try to sell "it"or were encouraged to try to sell it? Could it be argued that "it" is not a product until you have sold it.

You can take this another step and suggest that there is no point in producing a product unless there is a buyer in mind even if it is one to advertise to. when did the curators last have to buy any archaeology? Put their money where their mouths are? Just once I went into our local museum store and had a look at some old archives. I Set my standards by what I saw and I would encourage other archaeologists to do the same thing. when the curators moved into the planning departments and education departments they did a bunk on the museums stores.

[Dinosaur]

Maybe its just that no one understands our product? I've just been struggling with the following sentence in a report discussion:-

"Overall, the evidence suggests that although the pottery may suggest origins for some of the inhabitants, it was part of the pattern of consumption rather than an element of production."

Clear as mud...

[barkingdigger]

You can take this another step and suggest that there is no point in producing a product unless there is a buyer in mind even if it is one to advertise to. when did the curators last have to buy any archaeology?

Trouble with that model is that we have already made the moral compact with our society to publish our findings - we do this by taking on the "destruction" job in the first place! Having agreed to do the archaeology, in my mind it is a mortal sin demanding public crucifixion (inverted!) if we then refuse to provide the archive and report for other researchers. This unfortunately undermines our ability to play chicken with the potential buyers...

The real issue is that our product has intangible value rather than easily-calculated value - we are producing knowledge. And the bulk of our true "customers" aren't even involved in the cash deal - they are future researchers who will use our data to arrive at new understandings of the past. Our problem is the cash customers are exactly those folks who don't want our product at all because it interferes with their schedules and profits.

We have to get away from the materialistic shackles of capitalist economic models if we really want to understand the value of archaeology. Sadly, that doesn't help boost the wages...

[kevin wooldridge]

One of the problems is that there is so little money invested in research and synthesis of UK archaeological data. I can think of a number of potential projects that would demonstrate the 'added value' of archaeological data particularly with regard to environmental matters, climate change, sea level changes, previous exploitation of land, industrial pollution etc etc let alone its intrinsic cultural value.....We need a team of centrally funded 'super synthesisers' to develop and see through projects based on the mass of archaeological data created over the past 40 years.....