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n of circumstance that would promote ill health in particular poor mental health but we just don t know if it is a problem or not there is no data we have all these surveys of the profession but they are so limited in terms of what they ve examined we really need a sociological study of field archaeology that s kind of what the paper is about that someone needs to really go out and conduct some very in depth interviews with a great big pile of archaeologists and see what the situation is i suspect it would be bad but i wouldn t be that surprised if people are coping better than they might archaeologists are fairly rugged individuals and tend to have a bitter sense of humour that can see them through i d love to do it myself but it s such a huge project and i have no funding i m up to my eyes in unfunded hobby projects so i just can t take it on what i am doing at the moment is asking for people who have read the article to contribute their own experiences either as a comment at the bottom of the blog page or if they want to stay anonymous just to email it to me or send it to me on facebook or whatever that came about because quite a senior northern irish archaeologist wrote a lengthy and really emotional account of why she left the profession as a comment after the piece i was just blown away so i ve asked for more and any that come in will be included as an appendix in a physical version of the article that should be coming out next year i ll probably take the chance to make my own testimony and that would explain a lot about how i got interested in working on that topic in the first place the top of slievemore in county mayo during the summer of 2010 one of those moments when the great out doors really just takes the piss as for the problems facing field archaeologists in britain and ireland well the situations are quite different and that s going back for ten or fifteen years at least but in many ways it s equally bad it s no secret that there is a major problem with careers in field archaeology in terms of payment job security and career progression i don t really have any answers i m afraid the current mechanisms of competitive tendering in a deregulated market just don t allow for much progress to be made the institute for field archaeology and the institute of archaeologists of ireland are both in the same boat whilst they perform some important functions they just won t get involved in the issues which most field staff want them to archaeologists look for them to replicate some of the functions of unions but they can t or won t do it it doesn t help of course that many of the people running the companies that treat archaeological staff so poorly are heavily involved in these professional bodies the people directly responsible for the situation are members of these organisations and if there was a will to change it s always been in their power to make it happen it often seems like they are only involved in order to protect their own interests but that s probably an unfair and over simplistic view the involvement of the company owners provides a fantastic resource and they have such a wealth of knowledge about things the rest of us only ever get small glimpses of but at the same time it causes a lot of bitterness and distrust perhaps the company owners need to be separated off from the main body of the groups in some way like having them form an advisory panel that places their skills at the disposal of the rest of the membership but doesn t let them influence or even partake in voting i m sure both organisations would see membership rocket if there was a genuinely feeling that they were going to sort out these problems i know the diggers forum are trying to orchestrate a takeover of the ifa building a new world inside the shell of the old and all that and i wish them the best of luck it s the way the syndicalists in france managed it so it s a tactic that does have history personally though i think the only way it will change is through direct action david connolly at bajr has a mild version of this he s always saying that when archaeologists see poorly paid jobs they simply mustn t apply for them and he s right we can t fight against each other like that if no one takes the jobs at rock bottom prices they will have to offer more money so not taking work at lower than bajr rates is kind of a minimum requirement but i think it needs to go a little bit further than that i was disappointed that the representation for irish archaeologists group got diverted into a sort of sub committee within the iai i feel they would have been more effective as a separate organisation unfortunately at the moment the sub committee convened what had been a very lively and public discussion between lots of different people with lots of different views just ended and the handful of people that got onto the sub committee went off and that was that really the discussion group died and all of that energy and vitality evaporated i think history shows that with these struggles you need big popular movements an empowered collective of the staff secretive closed meetings between a handful of people on behalf of the rest well i wish them luck i really do but i do think it was a tactical error and made no secret of that at the time more interesting perhaps is what s going on with the unite union in ireland at the moment as they are making a big push to get archaeologists on board i guess there s a lot of scepticism about unions the profession isn t really their working class semi skilled natural environment but i m waiting to see how that goes in terms both of the level of engagement and to see if there s much in the way of a specific plan put forward jean o dowd is involved in that and she s bang on so i have some hope but whether that sinks or swims will really be down to unite producing a convincing document detailing the specifics of what they can do for archaeologists if enough of us join the sad thing is of course that the interests of the owners needn t be different from those of the staff if wages were higher contracts would be more expensive and the company owners could make more profit it s just something has to be done to take wage costs out of the equation when it comes to competitive tendering and no one is ever willing to make that first move the profession exists in an eternal mexican standoff the other really big thing we have to tackle once we have basic rates of pay sorted out is going to have to be pensions we need to find a way of getting a pension scheme for archaeologists something that can work for a career based on continually shifting between companies and regular bouts of unemployment this is were the iai and the ifa could really do something positive find a pension provider that can design a product with our needs find a way of companies being able to include a standard set of pension contributions along side wages because at the moment the reality for any archaeologist in my position is extremely grim i don t own a house and probably never will i ve never earned enough to buy one on occasion i have savings but every time i have a period of unemployment they get burnt up covering the bills and paying child maintenance at the moment if i were to retire i would be essentially destitute and the state would look after me but in 30 odd years time once the demographic crisis has kicked in forget about it when i think about my retirement i just see a cardboard home under a bridge in london and meals from a soup kitchen when my alcoholic compadres finally beat me to death for my spare change the local newspaper might run a small article about how i had once been an archaeologist and was known on the streets as the professor i know a lot of archaeologists in their mid to late thirties who have really been screwed over they went to college to get degrees fought like ninjas to get established worked in some pretty awful conditions because they were so committed to the work and basically they got nothing out of it at the end of the day they don t own houses they don t have good cars they don t have pension funds or savings it s like there s some hidden law that says archaeologists can t have nice things but we deserve better than that we really do and the thing is would you recommend your own kids followed you into archaeology i know i certainly don t tbom would you say specialising in archaeology could provide a way for field archaeologists to branch out stuart yeah why not there s certainly something a bit more like a normal career if you can get established as a pottery expert or an animal bones expert or that sort of thing you have to be very careful though if you re going to pay for training in some areas like surveying for example firms may be quite happy to use self taught bodgers rather than to pay for properly trained staff and of course if they can just get any old person to do it you can be damn sure they won t be paying very much money for a trained person i think it s a terrible shame people are expected to pay for their own training these days but that s across every industry companies are just no longer willing to commit to a person and fork out some cash to increase their skills as they have made no financial investment in their staff they are always dispensable horrible really but as it s going to be a personal investment you really need to do your research before handing over your money to a university or whoever is going to train you that stuff can get expensive really fast and you need to be completely sure that you will be getting high quality training that will actually be recognised and that there are genuinely improved career prospects for you at the end of it if you think about it in a particularly harsh way someone making these choices will have already wasted a lot of time and money doing an archaeology degree that hasn t provided them what they wanted so they mustn t make the same mistake again it s really at this point when you have to make the choice about whether to stay in archaeology and improve your skills or leave archaeology and get some entirely new ones instead wandering into the massive souterrain at carn euny in cornwall this was during the brief but glorious heat wave of 2013 it was nice to be cold and damp for a change but this sort of thing is sad in another way it always seems that specialists tend to be treated better than field staff especially if they are taken on to work in the company offices it all gets very cosy inside they get paid more get treated with more respect by the management they aren t putting up with all the constant relocation long commutes and shitty weather i suspect there is often cake and when you compare that to how field staff are treated it just doesn t make sense it s field staff that are out there doing the hard work having to deal with the developers face to face doing the graft that generates the companies profits and where s their cake honestly when does the boss ever turn up at break time on site and drop off a nice cake cake withholding bastards the lot of them more seriously though one of the old ifa guides made the point that on site specialists should be used to do certain tasks precisely because they are specialists and have the training but at the same time it should be acknowledged that the experienced site staff are specialists in the process of excavation and they have expertise and skills that are just as highly developed in their respective field and those skills should be fully utilised that always struck me as a very telling remark experienced site staff may have ridiculous amounts of experience literally decades of the stuff they can excavate any site you throw at them project mange the heck out of it know the legislations and regulations inside and out identify and process finds design and run sampling strategies undertake all manner of surveying tasks write reports provide training lecture tour guide pass peer reviews and certainly in the uk there isn t much in the way of financial recognition of the body of skills they are able to bring to bear when they made the excavation license interview in ireland much harder about 10 years back at least there was a clear understanding of the range of skills and depth of knowledge site directors needed it isn t a perfect system by any means but because it is a hard qualification to acquire and every site has to be run by a license eligible archaeologist located pretty permanently on the site it provided a great mechanism to raise wages all screwed now of course but that s a different story in the uk there s really no requirement to hire anyone with any serious level of experience to run sites so a company has some choices they can hire someone really capable that deserves and expects a decent wage they can offer an experienced archaeologist a job at an insultingly low rate or they can take some kid just a few years out of college pay them peanuts and give them sites to run they may or may not be able to handle using inexperienced staff to save money is a practice that goes wrong it goes wrong a lot and we all damn well know it does i don t mean to do younger staff down at all there s just so much to learn and it takes a long time to build up the skills it doesn t do a promising young archaeologist any good to be put in a situation they aren t ready for and just expect them to handle it with minimal support and it s certainly no good for the archaeology the other issue here is that there have been lots of scientific advances in the last while now there are specialists doing stuff that is frankly ridiculous the stuff that can be done with soil chemistry these days is insane they can pull viable and useful dna samples out of soil samples for crying out loud but that s confined to the university excavations that stuff hasn t really filtered down to the commercial world again we re back to the competitive tendering system it just doesn t allow for these new techniques to be used and the typical commercial dig is starting to look archaic when it should be the state of the art we really shouldn t be doing commercial work as second rate excavations but soon it will be clear to everyone that we ll be doing them as third rate excavations we need a fresh generation of specialists bringing these new methods out into the commercial environment that s only going to happen if there are requirements to do these new analysis imposed upon the commercial sector from outside of it from the regulatory bodies but whenever the archaeological community has looked to the various organisations for leadership the state archaeologists the institutes the associations the government there s never been anyone there tbom a very interesting point made on the commercial excavations noted also are the higher university fees for courses in the uk perhaps hindering specialism s in archaeology you have also started a campaign fo...
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