Digging deep for archaeology?

An article in the Independent – apparently to celebrate the start of the Festival of Archaeology – recognised the current problems of the archaeological profession in Britain. The profession has shrunken by a third, the loosening of the pay is low for graduates, one major department has closed its undergraduate course and there may be a shortage of diggers in the future, if the building and planning picks up. There are signs in our village that this is a case.

I could use this blog to marvel the unfortunate situation after the planning regulations recently. The developers build new estates to the villages where the infrastructure cannot support them. In our village the rush hour traffic is horrendous with long queues, since all the traffic to nearby villages goes through our village. The suggested solution by a developer: to remodel a roundabout to be a double roundabout that does not help to increase the flow – probably the opposite. The only way would be to create alternative realistic routes to Leicester city centre...

Anyway, archaeology is a curious profession, since the archaeological units have a margin thinning business model with competitive bargaining and short-term contracts for most of the workers when its core business is totally dependent of planning regulation. If that was to disappear, archaeology would probably go, too. The local museums are closing or cutting personnel and even if running the community archaeology will bring some jobs, it is unlikely to support thousands of fulltime staff permanently. The funding comes in piecemeal from grants and crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is offered as a solution, but I am sure hundreds of projects would not be guaranteed funding simultaneously. DigVentures is a high profile venture in this field and says that their grant money is not going to run out in three years, but they have to work continuously in order to keep money rolling in. Luckily, there will be people eager to fulfil their inner archaeologist dreams, but how many similar businesses the country could take? Businesses that could pay continuously salaries.

DigVentures is right in the fact that the archaeologist have to be creative and use all the possibilities, but it would be foolish to think that the crowdfunding will be the basis for long-term solution that will support academics, university departments and regular excavations at planning sites. However, it is a workable solution for shorter research excavations and field schools, but the market can saturate quickly. Nevertheless, the society and charity funding model is now expanding in Finland, for example, so it bring at least short-term help. We can only hope that the government do not shrink the state to the smitterings, since planning guidance is needed – not only to keep archaeology going but also to keep villages from being overdeveloped with overextended primary schools and too many cars in a daily traffic jam with no libraries or museums.