Dear List,
Further to my earlier missive, I feel that to be fair I should quote the other side of Neil Faulkner's argument:
"So we have two main trends in official archaeology today: privatisation and public archaeology. They are contradictory: the first is about turning archaeology into a business where the public has no place; the second is about getting ordinary people involved. And that, I suspect, is why both are happening at the same time. Because there is a strong and growing reaction against privatisation and exclusion, there is pressure to open things up, and the official response is to promote public archaeology. And they are quite genuine about this: professional archaeologists are not the enemy; most people go into archaeology because they love the subject and they want others to enjoy it too; the reactionaries are a minority; and the people choosing to work as 'public archaeologists' really want to involve ordinary people. I will not have people lumping all 'professionals' together and condemning them. I trained a few of them myself. Quite a few are colleagues on my research projects. Many more are friends or people I know and respect. In my experience, the great majority of professional archaeologists genuinely support public involvement; and especially those employed specifically in public archaeology jobs. So, can we simply sit back and bask in the warm glow of rising approval? No. There are two problems with official public archaeology as it is done at present. One is that it tends to be very top-down. The second is that there is a dodgy political agenda. The two problems are, of course, linked. The mix of privatisation and public archaeology is essentially Blairite. One feature of Blair's politics is that you hand public services over to the profiteers and then you cover up the decay and chaos that results by talking about community, social inclusion, multiculturalism, and other worthy things. The hospitals are filthy and the trains keep crashing, but you can have a little bit of money for a community drama group. And even the little bit you get is tightly regulated and controlled from above, because Blairites - all politicians, actually - are control-freaks who are terrified of democracy.
I think public archaeology is like that. Lots of good people are promoting it quite genuinely, but the approach tends to be top-down, bureaucratic, over-regulated. An example is the Shoreditch Park dig. Everything was on MoLAS terms. They set it up; they staffed it; they decided how it should be run; they controlled who got onto the site; they filtered the flow of information. It never seems to have entered anyone's head that you might use the money to create an independent local group to carry on the project jointly with the archaeologists; that you might democratise the thing; that you might actually empower - as opposed to simply involve - the local people. So there was still the dead-hand of Blairism."
Kindest regards,
Trevor
Visit: http://Ndology.blogspot.com for the archaeological news and views of North Devon
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