Apologies for cross posting.
Dear all
Can you help?
English Heritage are involved in a European projcet which involves the
development of a multilingual thesaurus concerning heritage legislation
I am having difficulty with one particular term. The Hungarian partner
informs me that I should be using the term "preventive archaeology" instead
of "rescue archaeology". Although an archaeologist by training it is some
years since I knelt in the rain, trowel in hand, therefore I have had to
resort to searching the web for information about this new term.
A search on google for "preventive archaeology" turns up 8 websites all of
which are English translations of French, Czech or Portuguese sites and most
of which at some point refer to the Valletta Convention.
A search on "rescue archaeology" brings up over 1400 sites.
The Hungarian partners have always stated that the Valletta Convention
refers to preventive archaeology which it does.... but not in the English
version.
They have now turned around and said that the convention is 10 years old and
I cannot use that as a reason for including a term which has gone out of
common usage, even though it was only ratified by the UK in 2002.
So the question is.. what do we as archaeologists use, preventive
archaeology or rescue archaeology?
Having discussed this with colleagues from EH I'm inclined to fight for the
term rescue archaeology but I don't want to force the issue if the general
community uses preventive.
So can somebody out there give me the definitive answer.
Sensible suggestions please to me off list at
[log in to unmask]
Thanks
Phil
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