I would agree very much with this comment.  Having worked on both sides of
the academic / curatorial fence I have seen a major lack of understanding
of, and interest in heritage conservation practice among academic
archaeology departments.  Sometimes it just isn't seen as relevant.
Sometimes it amounts to active but ill-informed denigration or opposition.
There are one or two exceptions, but on the whole we need the universities
to take this field much more seriously and get more people in to teach and
research it who actually know from direct experience what they are talking
about.

Archaeological heritage management itself needs a vigorous academic debate
about both principles and practice.  We need academic researchers to be
aware of the links between their findings and conservation management
practice, and we need applied research which has a direct benefit for the
type of work we do.

I would like to see much closer links forged between conservation and
research archaeology for the benefits of both


 John Wood




-----Original Message-----
From: Janet Davis [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 22 October 2001 11:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Comment on GIS Conference


Regarding Neil's comments on the research and development community not
getting involved with practical applications, I think that these apply
generally to the issues of image data and heritage applications. I have been
working in image data research over the last year (nothing to do with GIS),
and have been trying to get my software programmer colleagues interested in
various practical problems in the heritage field. There is a gap in
comprehension of issues of interest which I begin to think is quite deep
rooted. The academic researchers have been sort of interested but back off a
bit because they don't know about archaeology and heritage stuff.
Janet Davis


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