Friday 8 March 2024

An Archaeologist's Guide to British Species - Matthew Law

Matthew Law is one of the few British archaeologists to have persevered with the blog format and is now partway through creating An Archaeologist's Guide to British Species, with a page describing each plant or animal and its archaeological relevance, accompanied by a photo.     

This is a great resource for archaeologists trying to make sense of a palaeoenvironmental report, a hedgerow survey, or a landscape history.   It'll keep him busy for a while as he's on entry #94 and still in the Cs.



Upskilling yourself with Historic England

Historic England has relaunched its online training resources and there are a ranges of short courses of interest to readers of this blog.

  https://training.historicengland.org.uk/

It is free to register and undertake the courses; each takes 1-4 hours.


I would recommend:

KEY SKILLS

Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment - MoRPHE

This is a detailed walkthrough of Historic England's MoRPHE project management system and its manager's guide, which was developed as an application of PRINCE2 to replace MAP2.  Organisations undertaking work for Historic England are required to use MoRPHE, and it is also used by some as standard practice regardless of funding. (and if this description is a baffling set of acronyms you should do this course!)

Research Ethics & Integrity

This is based on UKRI guidelines for (academic) research, and is focused on potential harm to living participants, although cultural heritage is also covered.  It is interesting to compare and contrast with the CIFA Ethics workshop; I don't think either provide much of a handle for those facing the small everyday ethical dilemmas (am I knowledgeable/competent enough to make a judgment call on whether this bit of heritage can be destroyed?, my client wants me to ignore part of the impact - what can I do?).

HERITAGE FOR PLANNERS: ESSENTIALS

Despite the label, this section has courses that are of interest to anyone involved in presenting heritage information to planning authorities, and cover Historic England's guidance on heritage values, e and setting.

HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT

There's an excellent course on Statements of Heritage Significance and NPPF4.



 

      


Sunday 26 January 2020

10 Simple Steps: the e-book

The 2012 2nd edition is now available as a free pdf ebook from Carreg Ffylfan Press.



There are a few physical copies still available to purchase.

Tuesday 12 January 2016

The Grand Challenge for Archaeology- the information cycle

In the 1950s, archaeologists had a clear idea of their role.  Wheeler says 'unrecorded excavation is the unforgivable destruction of evidence (Archaeology from the Earth (1954), p. 209), and goes on to insist that proper publication is the duty of the excavating  archaeologist.  His final chapter, What are we digging, and why?, is uncharacteristically slippery, though.  It appears that this duty is primarily imposed to ensure that the contribution to knowledge would be shared with current and future peers, to establish a truth that could in due course be communicated to the world.

In the 1970s Philip Rahtz's Rescue Archaeology implicitly followed the same view  - volunteers were welcome to view or help, but the core of the work was the excavation, recording, and academic publication of the site for the benefit of the specialist reader.  (It is interesting to see that he estimates that there were in 1971 about 200 professional archaeologists in the UK).

When the IfA (now CIfA) was founded in the 1980s, it embodied this approach in its Code of Conduct, specifying that excavators had a duty to publish a site within 10 years.

I rehearse this ancient history as a reminder that the contemporary view I often encounter that an archaeologist's primary audience is a non-technical, popular, community one, that involving non-professionals in the process of excavation and recording, that digging and showing is more important than reporting and analysis, is a recent development, and one that has had an unwelcome effect on the profession at a time when resources are tight and hard choices must be made.

The Grand Challenge that I see facing UK archaeology is that archaeologists need to re-engage with all stages of the information cycle, from research, to reporting, to sharing data, placing a high value on prompt availability of credible data and on using the data of others.


SMRs and HERs

The aspect of archaeology I find most frustrating is the way archaeologists use Historic Environment Records.  As the concept emerged in the 1970s, as Sites and Monuments Records, they were transformative.  Previously archaeology had to be understood by laborious research using printed gazetteers and hand-drawn distribution maps; instead, all known sites were plotted on large-scale (1:10,000) maps and accompanied by standardised data (initially on paper but transferred to computer in the 1980s).  The shift to computers meant that thematic searching was expedited - all Bronze Age cairns could be listed by a simple query.  It wasn't until the 1990s that the paper maps were replaced by online mapping and GIS so that it was easy to zoom in and out, relate distributions to topography, and overlay historic mapping.  Many are now available online.

Given these incredible research tools, we should be enjoying a golden age of high quality research and publication, with thousands at work, excavating hundreds of sites, generating new data and contextualizing the results.  Instead it appears that most are content with superficial and credulous research and an apathy about the value of their contribution.  One trend I have learned to dread is the use, in grey literature reports, of an HER site listing included as supplied.  I can only assume that those using the data in this way have misunderstood what HERs seek to do and how they are compiled.

Historic Environment Records are intended to be an index to known archaeological sites in an area.  They do not, in principle, consider themselves to be primary sources (and most do not hold primary archival material).  As an index, they bring together published and unpublished information and classify it in order to aid retrieval.  Their interpretation and analysis is restricted to a basic health check and then an attempt to make the data most likely to be found.  HERs will usually accept the source's conclusion about what they found.   It is quite common to find that many of the sites are less definitive than they at first appear:  antiquarian reports will be given an estimated NGR, wholly unjustified by the convoluted and vague locational information (and it is also common for any finds or records to have vanished), or an excavator's over-enthusiastic conjecture about a site is taken at face value.

In the early rush of creating the SMRs, a lot of thought went into providing a handy synthesis of the evidence in a newly-written description, to save users the necessity of checking each source and reaching their own conclusions.  Increasingly this has been abandoned, partly because of the increase in workload, but also because the validity of the synthesis is questionable.  Of all the people writing about a site, you can be quite sure that the HER Officer won't have had the chance to visit it.  They are worst placed to rule on the weight assigned to sources.  Descriptions will therefore quote from successive sources without necessarily reaching a judgement.  Elsewhere, decisions cannot be ducked: the site must be given a category - cairn, natural feature, modern feature, and a date.  HER listings for Roman roads, prehistoric ritual landscapes, or Dark Age burials often vanish into mundane, modern or natural features, their more dramatic classification being a relic of past fancy.  HERs cannot completely expunge such records, since a researcher may come across the original source and seek the relevant HER record.

The questions lying behind the maintenance of an HER are thus complex - addressed in the MIDAS data standard towards which many are working.

There are, as well as these unavoidable issues, other problems: sources may have been mistranscribed or misunderstood, or not consulted, and, fatally, NGRs may be mistyped.  When HERs were undertaking audits it was found that backlogs of 2 years of data awaiting input were not unusual.   Some sectors are much worse at making their results available: academics, independents, community groups, all unconstrained by planning, are much less likely to feed into HERs.

So HERs are, as an academic said about Wikipedia, a good place to start your research and a very bad place to stop.


Recording and reporting

Yes I know, don't call it excavation call it preservation by record.  But if we say this, and mean this, why is that the standard of records is so low, content with simple standardised descriptions with all the pondering on interpretation and significance left out.  This then feeds through into dull reports which say very little.  I was looking at a report on an evaluation by a professional unit that encountered a complex of prehistoric features.  Their date and purpose were left uncertain by the evaluation, but the conclusion decided that since they were of unknown significance no further investigation was warranted.   Somebody who considered themselves a professional was so incurious that they were happy to shrug their shoulders and walk away,  Even worse, there had been another development on adjoining land, not mentioned in the report, which had found more features, dated this time.  There is a case for archaeologists seeing themselves as technicians, servants of a process, creating data for others, but that seems to me to be an abdication of responsibility.  The excavator of  a site has spent weeks onsite and off engaging with the site and its  features occupying the forefront of their brain.  They, if well informed and thoughtful, are by far the most likely person to establish the truth.  One of the sad features of modern corporate archaeology is that there is little room for the bold hypothesis or imaginative site narrative - the passion and vision we hope to encounter on a site tour is routinely smoothed into tedium by the reporting process.


Reading


Which brings us back to Wheeler and publications.  Archaeologists need to be interested in more than their particular site or region.  They need to understand the context, the research questions, the developing narratives.  Otherwise they will end up making silly claims, that their watching brief with a Roman burial will 're-write our understanding of the conquest of Britain', or a ditch will change the way Bronze Age barrows are interpreted.  For much of the 20th century, sites were dug with unskilled, volunteer, or lackadaisical staff, with minimal resources.  That work produced the big books and the big theories that we still refer to.  Somehow, the plethora of data and the ease with which it can be accessed has narrowed our thinking.




Note

This essay is not intended to criticise any individuals or organisations; I genuinely believe that they are doing the best they can in difficult circumstances.  My examples are anonymised and included to highlight where I believe we have gone wrong.



This post is part of the Archaeology Blog Festival

Friday 21 March 2014

The future

"Next month is the SAA session on blogging so this will be the final question for #blogarch. Learning from my mistakes this will be an actual question this time.
The last question is where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go? I leave it up to you to choose between reflecting on you and your blog personally or all of archaeology blogging/bloggers or both. Tells us your goals for blogging. Or if you have none why that is? Tell us the direction that you hope blogging takes in archaeology.
Short and simple and I hope a good question to finish off #BlogArch with."

The great value of this blog to me is that it's a playground where I can write whatever I want, and people do find their way to it.   I am currently involved in two initiatives which build on my 10 simple steps work: the setting up of a Project Management Group for the IfA, and a research project I am currently developing  interviewing archaeologists about how they construct their sense of professional identity.  Both of these initiatives will exist in other forms, but here is where I can add quick updates, try out bits of text, and provide pointers to related sources.

This last point sounds trivial, but it is easy to overlook.  Before websites, the following up of an article's references was a long, tedious and frustrating experience, even for people who had the chance to drop in to a university library that might hold the relevant journals.   Now there's a lot that is readily available, and linked directly.  It's true that much academic publishing is locked off to all but specialists in academia, but even so it is much easier to be well-informed than it used to be.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Blogging archaeology - my top posts



This post is part of a blog carnival in the run-up to SAA 2014:

Over the last seven years there have been 20,900 pages viewed. Whether you think that's a lot depends on your expectations. Most of the traffic comes from Google searches, although some follow links from university archaeology courses cite it as an online resource. It is notable that most of search terms are post titles, which means that 'meat and potatoes' post titles work better than clever allusive and obscure ones.

EntryPageviews
1434

20 Dec 2007, 1 comment
717
478
385
303
1 Jan 2013, 3 comments
261


241
14 Feb 2012, 1 comment
191
28 Nov 2007, 1 comment
189
136
I am pleased that the post on How to get your first job in archaeology is popular, reflecting a bit of a vacuum elsewhere (the CBA website's careers advice is vague and optimistic). The otehr popular posts get significant traffic from people searching for general advice on PRINCE2, lean management, training action plans,  and Powerpoint.  The essay on Commercial archaeology  is an interesting case, where the academic published literature on ethics and development in archaeology  are sparse and therefore this contribution to the debate fills a gap.

If I was to take a gloomy view I could say that it is impossible to predict which of the posts will go viral, to the extent of finding most readers, and I am disappointed at the much smaller number of readers who explore the site at length.  But in away that's not surprising: the potential audience of new archaeology graduates or people working in generic management is much larger than my core audience -  commercial arcaheologists who have just been promoted to project managers.

Wednesday 27 November 2013

Why this blog started and (nearly) stopped


This post is part of a blog carnival in the run-up to SAA 2014:

Why blogging? – Why did you start a blog? 
I started the 10 simple steps to better archaeological management  blog in 2008 as I was preparing  a presentation for the 2009 IfA conference.  I have had a long interest in the applaiction of comemrcial management theory to the practice of archaeology, and had a few things I wanted to say about where archaeologists were going wrong. 
I had been blogging on life and literature since 2004, mainly as an outlet for writing that didn't have anywhere else to go, and it seemed natural to use the same format in the run-up to the conference, if only to share the concepts with the other speakers in the session.   I was surprised to find that there was little overlap between the papers, because they addressed a wide range of topics under the umbrella of archaeological management, and little discussion arose.  But in any case, writing the blog meant that I prepared the text in advance (my usual practice is to make up a powerpoint set and wing it on the day), and of course the chance to include links to the sources cited and further infromation is much better than the usual talk which hopes that the audinece's notes manage to capture something of what was said.     
I recognised early on that I would not in fact be able to fit everything i wanted to say in the 20 minutes allowed, and so I decided to use print-on-demand technology (Lulu.com) to produce a book version of the paper for sale at the conference (it was a simple process to paste the posts into a Word file, convert it to pdf, and create the book).   
Although the talk went well, and some books were sold, I was disappointed by the lack of follow-up in terms of readership of the blog.  Most people found the blog through Google searches for individual terms, and almost all only read one or two posts.
Why are you still blogging? / Why have you stopped blogging
I have always had strong opinions about the practice of archaeology, and although I have published in learned journals and elsewhere  I have found the constraints of academic and professional writing hard work.  The great joys of blogging are:
  • a chance to express an unpopular, extreme or impolitic opinion unfettered by an editorial hand
  • a chance to write as long or as short as I want, in informal language, with jokes  and asides
  • a chance to write about any topic I choose
  • a chance to respond in real time to emerging news stories rather than waiting for a print version to appear

Over time, without seeking subjects out, I have added to the initial brief overview, and these have fomred the basis of the much expanded and revised 2nd edition of the book.   I would have had little chance to write this book as a concerted exercise, and would have found immense difficulty in finding a publisher: the economics of a short print run and a niche market reached through the website only make sense as a do-it-yourself business.

The frequency of blog posts had dropped dramatically over the last couple of years, mainly because I haven't come across burning issues on which I have anything to add, and aslo because my 'spare' time is directed more towards poetry.


It is pleasing to see that some of the posts, especially How to get your first job  and Ethics and commercial archaeology    , continue to get a lot of traffic, including links from university courses, and it is clear that the blog fills a gap in the information and guidance that is available.  My regret is that the promise of Web 2.0 to generate a global conversation remains unfulfilled - the Twitter model rather than Wikipedia.