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Teaching and Training in Archaeology: a historical perspective with John Collis - Ep 41
692 Plays3 years ago
Archaeology & Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. This month we are proud to host John R. Collis from the University of Sheffield speaking on "Teaching and Training in Archaeology: a Historical Perspective with John Collis." This talk took place on Wednesday, June 30th, 2021, online via Google Meets.
John Collis, the University of Sheffield
John Collis studied archaeology in Cambridge in the 1960s, but also briefly in Prague, Tübingen and Frankfurt. He was an advisor at the research centre in Mont Beuvray in Burgundy for 17 years, and led excavations and field work in the Auvergne and in central Spain as well as England. He lectured in Sheffield from 1972 to 2005 and was one of the founding members of the department in 1975. He lectured on the European and the British Iron Age, and is mainly known for his writings on the Iron Age, urbanisation and the problems of the Celts. He also lectured on excavation techniques, and wrote Digging up the Past based on his lectures. However he was also writing about the training of archaeologists, and was chair of the Teaching and Training Committee of the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists (of which he was as a founding member), and helped introduce Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for archaeologists. He also set up the Teaching Committee of the European Association of Archaeologists to discuss the impact of the ‘Bologna’ structure on university degree courses and its impact on archaeology. He was advisor to the first European ‘Profiling the Profession’ led by Kenny Aitchison. He has written several articles on the ways in which training is given and different European traditions of teaching, digging and defining archaeologists.
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Nail Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
John Arcolis on Teaching and Training in Archaeology
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 41 of Archaeology Nail, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. This time, our guest speaker is John Arcolis, speaking about teaching and training in archaeology, a historical perspective. Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, this talk is taking place online via Google Meets, so there may be some background noise or audio feedback in our recording. Enjoy!
John Arcolis' Career and Contributions
00:01:10
Speaker
I stuck on the things about when I was here. I was actually one of the founders of the department back in 1975. And as I said, I retired in 2004, but went on teaching for a while. And I was actually head of department for my sins in 1990, 1993.
00:01:30
Speaker
But on the side, I was also doing other things, mainly looking at aspects of of training and education. And in the 1990s, 2000s, I was doing quite a lot of work with organizations like the what was in the Institute for Archaeologists and now the Chartered Institute. And part of the work I was doing was getting ready for it to have a chartered status.
00:01:56
Speaker
And so I was involved in the Career Development and Training Committee and chairman of it for
Career Development and National Standards in Archaeology
00:02:01
Speaker
a while. I had a higher education subcommittee with Jairus Chairman. And we did quite a number of important things like, well, trying to get a career structure for especially for the commercial archaeologists because they were just leaving in droves because there was no career structure for them.
00:02:18
Speaker
And so we started introducing things like CPD and things that you probably never heard of, but which are absolutely fundamental to the structure of archaeology and archaeological training in this country. Things like national occupational standards.
00:02:33
Speaker
which basically is telling us what an archaeologist needs to know to be able to practice properly. And one of the interesting things that came out of that, we have professionals at drawing up these standards and they've been doing things like architecture and so on. And they said that, in fact, archaeology is one of the most complicated ones that they had to do in terms of the range of knowledge and subjects that we had to have.
00:02:59
Speaker
So that puts a bit of a mockery on what the university is trying to do. I doubt that they've even heard of national standards.
Education Structures and Their Impact on Archaeology
00:03:07
Speaker
But anyway, at the end of my time, they got rid of our committee because they thought we'd done our job and they appointed a full-time training officer, Kenny Acheson, who some of you may have come across, but a Sheffield graduate. And now he's moved on to other things, still not very much involved, but he
00:03:28
Speaker
He's been replaced by Kate Geary. So suddenly the IFA, SIFA, was taking training very seriously indeed, and also organisations like English Heritage. But at the same time, at that time, there were other things going on at the European level, and most notably the introduction of the so-called Bologna structure, and the effect that this was having on archaeological degrees. It wasn't only for archaeology, it was the whole of the university sector,
00:03:57
Speaker
And there were agreements being made at very high levels within the States. And so I got together a committee for the European Association of Archaeologists to give people advice about what was going on. I couldn't do much about what was actually happening. That was decided much higher level, but we could at least react and advise people.
00:04:20
Speaker
But I've also been trying to get some of my teaching, some stuff on the European eye, trying to get this available. And the one that book which came into this
00:04:36
Speaker
area was my book, Digging Up the Past, which was basically, as it says, an introduction to archaeological excavation. Unfortunately, never really marketed properly, but Current Archaeology said it was the best of a bunch back in about 2010. And some of the illustrations you'll be seeing actually come out of that book, looking at the way of excavations are organized.
00:05:02
Speaker
At any rate, we'll be asking one or two fairly fundamental questions, like why do archaeologists or why do people go to university? And that's not quite as straightforward as one might think. And so a lot of this I'll be contrasting the German setup with the English setup.
00:05:24
Speaker
which will then start to explain why Britain started playing such a major role in the later part of the last century in developing ideas in archaeology. At any rate, we'll just make the first distinction. In Germany, you go to university, if you're an archaeologist, to get a qualification.
00:05:44
Speaker
And that is a piece of paper saying that you are a qualified archaeologist, and so you can start applying for permits to do excavation and getting grants. Whereas in England, we go to university to get an education, which is something rather different. And so we had frock coming back, coming in from the 19th century.
00:06:07
Speaker
and dominating quite a lot of the 20th century, the concept of the gifted amateur. And so, for instance, the people who were becoming our politicians in civil service, they were not doing as they did in France, for instance, where you would go to one of the polytechnics to be studying how to be a civil servant and so on.
00:06:27
Speaker
The idea in Britain was that with the right
Professional Mobility and Standards in European Archaeology
00:06:31
Speaker
training in logic and so on, you could really do anything you could do to any any sorts of roles. And so a big emphasis, especially from the so-called public schools, the eating and Winchester and places like that, people will be studying to get a history degree or classics degree or in Oxford. PPE was a favorite for people going into politics, philosophy, politics and the
00:06:57
Speaker
economics, and just assume that people could adjust to many roles. And our present Prime Minister is really out of that tradition. He's somebody with a classics degree. One of the other things I got involved with, this with Kenny Aitchison, who I've already mentioned,
00:07:14
Speaker
was a thing called Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe. It was a follow-up of a thing that was done in England, or deep Britain, discovering the archaeologists of Britain, financed in part by the
00:07:30
Speaker
by what was an English heritage. And after the British one came out, we jointly got to join up with people in through the EAA, the European Association of Archaeologists, to have a joint project looking, called profiling the profession, where we looked at the organization of
00:07:57
Speaker
the profession in a dozen different countries, from small countries like Malta up to large ones like Germany and Britain. And this is now done every five years. The information is found to be so useful that everybody wants to get hold of it.
00:08:17
Speaker
And what originally the idea was, looking back at those good old days when we were part of the common market, was to investigate the potential for transnational movement so that people can move from one country to another with agreed standards in archaeology.
00:08:42
Speaker
but the problem is that there were really different definitions of archaeologists and I'll be taking again the contrast between Britain and Germany but also the very different nature of the university training, the different structures that universities and indeed archaeology generally had and also looking at things like the
00:09:06
Speaker
the need for continuous training, the development of CPD on an international front. So just to take an example of the sorts of problems we were encountering, when we had individual teams in each country doing the work and trying to use the same basic methods,
00:09:32
Speaker
But in Britain, this is I think 2006 or somewhere around there, in Britain there were 6,865 archaeologists that Kenny managed to identify. Whereas in Germany, a much larger country, there were only 2,500.
00:09:51
Speaker
So does this mean that Germany was poorly provisioned for archaeology? But when we add the ancillary staff who were engaged in archaeology, we only had 866 in Britain, whereas for Germany we had 8,049.
Inclusivity and Expansion in Archaeology Education
00:10:10
Speaker
Suddenly, we see the numbers becoming a bit more sensible. The total number of people engaged in archaeology is just under 8,000, whereas in Germany it is well over 100,000. So, immediately you're asking what's going on here, and obviously it comes back to definitions of what an archaeologist is.
00:10:32
Speaker
So in Britain, we're just dealing with the definition of an archaeologist is someone who does archaeology, and they can be coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. Whereas in Germany, an archaeologist is someone with a professional qualifications to carry out archaeology. And this, in fact, usually means a doctorate. So we're not comparing similar things. It means that the way in which archaeology is structured in the different countries is very different.
00:11:01
Speaker
And just to take another example of one of our graduates, I'm sure he wouldn't mind me using him as an example of sorts of problems. He's someone who graduated from Sheffield about, I suppose about 30 odd years ago. He met a Spanish lady, as one does, and married her and moved to Spain and was teaching English, but started doing voluntary work at the museum in Alicante. And they got some money to employ an archaeologist.
00:11:26
Speaker
So he applied for the job and they wanted to appoint him, but he was rejected because the local government said he was not qualified. And the reason he was not qualified was that there is no such degree in Spain as archaeology. What you need is a degree in history. So when it comes across this rather stupid and lonely
00:11:49
Speaker
We even got the leading professor in Madrid, Gonzalo Lee Tapatero, in the Compredencé Museum, writing to the officials and saying, look, this is ridiculous. He's more qualified in archaeology than any of the other people you're thinking of appointing. But even he could get absolutely nowhere. And Dan, in the finders, in the end, just came up, came back to England and they worked for Heritage England.
00:12:16
Speaker
So there are a lot of basic things like this going on, which was preventing movement around. So this leads one on to say, well, who are these people who are archaeologists? And to the world in which I was born to, the archaeologists were basically middle class people with private incomes. They perhaps have a bachelor's degree in history or classic or ancient history.
00:12:41
Speaker
In the 1930s, masters in archaeology were introduced into the Institutes of Archaeology in London and Oxford, and one or two people at places like Cambridge were starting to get undergraduate degrees as well. But the image that one had from television at that time when I was growing up in the 1950s were the men in three-piece suits with cufflinks and so on.
00:13:07
Speaker
looking very smart. People like some Waterman Wheeler, Glyn Daniel, and the person who was my professor Graham Clark, and then the women tend to be wearing tweed skirts and so on. Very tough ladies, people like Kathleen Kenyon, Lady Eileen Fox, who was later to become one of my co-workers in the University of Exeter, and of course Professor Dorothy Garrett at Cambridge, who was the first female professor in any subject at universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
00:13:36
Speaker
But there were very few professional posts and some in the universities, museums, government, administrative works. But it was a very small group. And certainly when when I was going through the system, we were being advised not to go into archaeology unless we had a private income of some sort. So really a very, very different word.
00:14:00
Speaker
What happened for my generation was a thing called, in Britain, was a thing called the 1944 Education Act. And this suddenly made a free secondary education available. All of my family I had, I have about taking people who married into the family, probably about 30 or more aunts and uncles. Only one of them went to school.
00:14:23
Speaker
beyond the age of 15, and he only until he was 16. So it was not people talk about being the first of their family to go to university. For me, I was the first one of my family to go to grammar school, let alone at university.
00:14:39
Speaker
And at that time, in Britain, the normal level that one worked to at the university was up to the bachelor level. Again, this is generally in all subjects, except things like engineering and medicine, certainly in the arts. And after three years, you would go out with your bachelor degree, and that would be the entry point into the professions, into the careers.
00:15:07
Speaker
Suddenly, after 1944, we started seeing a new group of archaeologists coming in from the lower classes who were acting as volunteers on excavations during their occasions.
00:15:22
Speaker
And so and I will be working at weekends with the local museum helping on their excavations or indeed sometimes doing the excavations for them. And so we were a group of people who were brought up with a great emphasis on practical skills. We learned how to dig using a pick and shovel and trowels and so on.
00:15:43
Speaker
And suddenly the whole image of what an archaeologist looked like changed. Suddenly we became young dressed in jeans and t-shirts and shorts and sandals and in some of the male cases with beards as well. So very different from the people who'd gone before us.
00:16:02
Speaker
When we come to the 1960s, so it is still we're looking at an elite education and one which is very much dictated by money and very much a question of where your examination marks good enough to get you into university. If you got into university, then your fees were paid. And depending on how much money your parents had, you would get some sort of grant. I got almost the maximum grant coming from a sort of lower middle class working
00:16:32
Speaker
working class background. At this time, archaeology was beginning to appear in a number of universities where one could go to study, and the main ones were Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast.
00:16:50
Speaker
The people I was meeting on excavations were advising me to go for Cambridge, if I possibly could. And that fortunately was what I managed to do. And then the postgraduate level, well, most universities were educating postgraduates. But we've seen that places like London and Oxford were offering master's degrees. And these are essentially sort of conversion courses with people who had not studied archaeology and
00:17:18
Speaker
study something like history, and so for them to become archaeologists. Most people just stayed on to do the bachelor as before, and only a small minority of people would go on to do the doctorate. We'll see a big contrast there with Germany, and it was only those who wanted to go into some sort of academic life.
00:17:42
Speaker
The master's degrees were really unimportant, and we'll look at those a little bit later. With the 1960s, 1970s, there was a big expansion. Suddenly, up to 20 percent of the population were beginning to go to university. And this is when the new archaeology departments came into existence. And we're really talking there. The ones that were really dynamic at that time were Sheffield, Southampton and Reading.
00:18:12
Speaker
We still get our grants, our fees were paid, but by the time we come up to 2006, up to 40% of the population was going to university, and the hopes were to expand up to 50%. But this, of course, started putting
00:18:28
Speaker
putting great strains on the university finances. And so gradually payment fees and grants started being diminished until largely they disappeared and we had to move over to the system of loans.
00:18:46
Speaker
Just say a few words as well about what were normally labeled as specialists. And in Britain, these were just archaeologists who worked with non-traditional data. We weren't going around drawing pots and looking at metal objects and things like that in museums. And people were starting to work on animal bones and pollen.
00:19:09
Speaker
In fact, when I first came to Sheffield, I'd been digging in Exeter and I brought some of the finds up to work on. It was the animal bones. It wasn't the pottery and things like that. Museums weren't really interested in that.
Evolving Excavation Practices
00:19:23
Speaker
But we found a number of people who were coming from outside traditional archaeology, environmentalists like John Stell Evans coming in from
00:19:34
Speaker
of biology, statisticians like Gary Locke, or geologists like David Peacock. And as far as we were concerned, they were archaeologists. And as such, there was nothing to prevent them going out and doing their own excavations, which they did. And really just a very different approach. I suppose David Peacock was the one that
00:19:58
Speaker
most intimidated the museum people. Instead of turning up with a pencil and paper to draw the shape of the pots, he turned up with a hacksaw and was hacking bits off of the pottery. Completely different in Germany because these people were not
00:20:13
Speaker
archaeologists, indeed, to a certain extent, they didn't exist. If you wanted your animal bones looked at, you had to go to somebody from another discipline. So for instance, for the Tio Institute, these were not people who were allowed to excavate. And the problem was that they came in with their own questions. They weren't particularly lined up to deal with the sorts of questions that we as archaeologists were beginning to ask.
00:20:42
Speaker
So that was a quick overview of some of the things that were going on in the universities and the contrasts that were beginning to develop between what was happening in Britain and what was happening on the continent. What was also going on was a change in excavation structures. And we see this really going on through the 1960s and 1970s.
00:21:06
Speaker
As I've already mentioned, in the 1930s, we were looking at an elite group who were directing the excavations and doing the recording, and the digging was largely done by, usually unskilled, but some very skilled excavators who started making their life working for people like some autumn a wheeler.
00:21:26
Speaker
But in the 1950s, we see this increasing importance of student volunteers replacing them. And by the time we get to largely 1960, the workmen have been largely replaced by student volunteers. And we start seeing a new structure, which is based on a sort of meritocracy that you can start at the bottom and work your way up to the top.
00:21:50
Speaker
I said mainly by the time we come to the 1970s when we see the professional archaeology the professional archaeology really beginning to take off the majority of the people on an excavation would be people who would have a degree not necessarily in archaeology.
00:22:10
Speaker
usually people with a bachelor degree. Enormous contrast with Germany, if you went on an excavation there, you would be very lucky to meet an archaeologist because the excavations were run by these people with doctorates working usually for the local denkmaftle, denkmaft amt, and they usually have several excavations that they were running, so they'd be moving around from one excavation to another, so you had to be lucky to get
00:22:40
Speaker
or make an arrangement to actually meet them on site. Again, in Britain, by the time we got to 2006, over 90% of the archaeologists in the field, or indeed an archaeology generally, would have a degree. And for the people under 30, the percentage was even higher. So we see this enormous shift of the people who are actually doing the digging and taken from my book on excavation methods, where I've tried to show diagrammatically what was going on.
00:23:10
Speaker
So with the traditional system of support of a wheeler, you would have the middle class group who would be the director and the supervisors and perhaps some students, and they would be looking after the administration documentation and perhaps doing some of the fine digging.
00:23:28
Speaker
main digging would be done by the labourers. And you had here a ceiling that virtually nobody from the digging group of people would be able to move up into the upper hierarchy. And so this is a real dotted line that I put in there, is a real class division.
00:23:49
Speaker
As I said, when we come to the 1960s, this is breaking down. And so I won't go through these in too much detail, but basically, you could start it somewhere like Perilamium and as a volunteer.
00:24:05
Speaker
be having to pay your own way to get there. But if you were a useful digger, the excavator, Shepherd Freer, might offer you payment to be a student laborer. And so I remember the first card I got was from Syrancester, John Wager, saying he was willing to pay me five shillings an hour to act as a student laborer, which for someone like me was quite big money at the time.
00:24:29
Speaker
But from there you could gradually move up, volunteer to student labour or the site supervisor, and then go on to be directing excavations. So it reflected in many ways what was going on in society. I put in Winchester as well, they never really used the student labourers, and so one would be moving up from volunteer up into the various supervisorial
00:24:56
Speaker
levels and you'll be taught how to be doing your digging actually in the field. And well, I won't go into the what was going on in the professional units, other than to say that we start finding in the 1980s, especially that the people who are doing the digging, the structures become very much more complex.
00:25:17
Speaker
And when we come down to the very bottom, it really is a much more egalitarian system. There is a project director. There will be perhaps a field coordinator. But more and more, the people who were doing the digging were young professionals and they would be expected to be doing their own recording and so on within the structure of the
Comparing European Archaeology Education Systems
00:25:40
Speaker
of the excavation. So we've moved from a very hierarchical to a relatively egalitarian structure. But this was something which was rather peculiar to Britain. I don't know quite what the situation is any longer in Greece, but at the time I was writing about these things, you would have a director, you would have supervisors and so on and students.
00:26:06
Speaker
And essentially, in fact, you had the Wheeler structure. But the reasons for this was that if you were doing an excavation in Greece, that's also true in places like Bolivia. This was seen as a way of bringing money in from outside into into societies.
00:26:23
Speaker
where outside money was more than welcome. And so you will be expected to be employing some of the local laborers. Indeed, it will very often be written into your permit. And a recent paper I read about Bolivia was that the opportunity to work on the excavation
00:26:41
Speaker
had to be spread amongst the whole community, so there would be a continuous change going on as to who was working on the excavation, doing things like the digging and the washing of the finds and the sieving and so on. In Germany, in the Netherlands, we had a rather different sort of setup, and there the normal structure was these people with their
00:27:03
Speaker
doctorates would be coming out and directing the excavations and eventually writing them up. But the people who were actually doing the excavation and the recording were in fact a class of technicians, some of them extremely highly skilled, but without the academic training that the archaeologists had.
00:27:24
Speaker
And then underneath these, you would have a foreman who would be looking after the labors again. In fact, when I was working in southern Germany, a lot of the people who were doing the digging were people from Eastern Europe, from the communist block.
00:27:39
Speaker
A moot point is to how many of these people were archaeologists. I'm just looking at this and thinking, well, I've got this wrong because the technicians were in fact not counted as archaeologists. These were the people who were being let out as in the definition of archaeologists.
00:27:55
Speaker
And specialists really were specialists. They were not people with archaeological expertise. As we've already mentioned, the 1970s started to see the sudden expansion of the archaeological world. And it's these people who had been student volunteers in the 60s and going on into the 70s who formed the bulk of the people who in this country became the young professionals.
00:28:21
Speaker
again, but they were coming from all different sorts of backgrounds who didn't have to have an archaeological degree to become an excavator. And many people, again, were without archaeological degrees from moving up. We even had professors in Britain of archaeology who didn't have archaeological degrees, and indeed one or two of them who, I can think of one or two cases of people, professors who didn't have any degree at all.
00:28:47
Speaker
We had a very much more flexible system than one had on the continent.
00:28:52
Speaker
When I was writing about these things and trying to decide really what was going on, I decided there were perhaps three main classes of the way in which archaeology was being taught at universities. In fact, when one looks at detail, there is enormous variety from one country to another. But what I call the fragmented system, archaeology is part of another discipline, as we've already seen it in Spain with the problem of the history degrees.
00:29:21
Speaker
But we would find that archaeology was considered largely to be part of another discipline, like history or art history, ancient history. Doing pyolithic archaeology in France, you would be studying geology. And there were no very few archaeology departments. In places like France, the best archaeologists were peeled off to join the CLRS, which was essentially a research position. But some of them got themselves involved in teaching.
00:29:51
Speaker
But the people who were doing the teaching in the universities were rather looked upon as being the sort of second level of archaeologists. Archaeology, if one was going in to become an archaeologist, would be largely done either as specializations right at the end of your art history or whatever degree or at the postgraduate level.
00:30:12
Speaker
And this is a system which was typical of France back in the 1960s, 1970s. It was a disaster. And it got so bad that the French government set up a national committee to try and work out what had gone wrong and why France, in its ideas and the development of its archaeology, was so refined its neighbors like Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain.
00:30:40
Speaker
So basically this fragmented system where you had staff in the universities who were dotted around in other departments, it just did not work. And this, of course, is what the powers of being Sheffield are suggesting we should go back to. And we know it doesn't work. One must ask why on earth they're not listening to us.
00:31:03
Speaker
One could occasionally get larger departments. The normal number of lecturers in university, you perhaps get two or three, but as I said, in different departments. But there were exceptions, and in Spain, history was seen as a way to become an archaeologist.
00:31:21
Speaker
And so they did tend to get fairly large departments, but as the advertising for holidays in Spain under Franco said, Spain is different and in some ways it probably still is.
00:31:35
Speaker
Then my second system was what I call the closed system. This is where archaeology exists as a separate discipline, but it is something which is mainly for this professional training to get your qualifications. And the people who would be going through the system would normally be employed
00:31:55
Speaker
And locally, they would end up as local archaeologists, but going in with their doctorates. So they would normally be studying for about five years at minimum, usually seven or eight.
00:32:10
Speaker
usually doing excavation work in the meantime. The emphasis of the training there was on methodology excavation, though running excavations, most of them, these people did not have much experience in actual digging. And then there would be the artifact identification, studying collections in museums, dating, and the dominant approach was so-called culture history, looking at cultures or historical archaeology.
00:32:40
Speaker
So, what one ended up with was very small, highly specialized departments based on studying at different periods. So, you would have a department of Urgeschichter looking at Palalithic, Fortenfrugeschichter, which is largely looking at prehistory.
00:32:59
Speaker
and going on in perhaps in some places early historical period, Roman provincial archaeology, medieval, or perhaps near Eastern archaeology. But a university could have two or three, four of these departments working independently, and the normal size of the departments there would be perhaps about three to five lectures.
00:33:23
Speaker
And this was absolutely typical of the people who had this so-called Humboldt system, which we'll look at later, but it's very typical of Germany and of Scandinavia, and to a certain extent of the central European countries as well, places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. And then we come to what I call the open system. This is where archaeology exists as a separate discipline, but it is invading the neighboring disciplines.
00:33:52
Speaker
because the specialists in those disciplines are not dealing with archaeological questions and so you find the archaeologists are teaching themselves botany and biology and so on. And the result of this was one started getting rather more general degrees.
00:34:13
Speaker
And well, when we were writing in the late 1990s, early 2000s, it was fairly common in Britain to have 10 or 20 lecturers. And people were increasingly being appointed by the specialists and that they could offer the department and the training of the students. So things like animal bones and pottery analysis, metalworking, I suppose for Caroline, I must add glassworking and so on.
00:34:43
Speaker
So suddenly we're getting a large range of things that are being taught together and fitting in very nicely with the national occupational standards that people were getting a very wide education in a whole series of different areas. And there was a very strong emphasis on teaching theory, but also teaching practical methodologies such as work in laboratories or field work.
00:35:09
Speaker
the sort of stuff that many of you will be familiar with. And at that time, it was really typical of Britain more than any other country. So we were getting further and further away from what was going on on the continent. And here I've sort of symbolized this in the drawing over on the left, but there is a fragmented system with each subject with perhaps one or two archaeologists teaching within other subjects like history or the history of art and so on.
00:35:38
Speaker
as I said, typical of France, and it just collapsed in the 1970s. And the people who have been doing research in the CNRS started being more attached to universities and involved more in teaching.
00:35:54
Speaker
And now if you look at the places that are listed as the top universities at which to study, suddenly the French are there with, well, the places I have most to do with places like Bordeaux and Toulouse, and to a certain extent Paris as well. So a complete change really there. In the closed system in middle, which I said was typical of Germany, you have these tightly defined subjects.
00:36:18
Speaker
You can perhaps do a bit of botany, an extra part of your degree, but these other subjects were not really integrated with what the archaeologists were doing. One of the things that was notably lacking in Germany was the theoretical approach, and it got so bad in the end that the younger students and the younger lecturers finally got together
00:36:44
Speaker
And they decided we need an equivalent of the TAG, Theoretical Archaeology Group. And suddenly, at the 1990 meeting of TAG in Lampeter, there were, I've forgotten how many, 60, 70, 80 young Germans turned up and had their own, well, they talked about German archaeology for the rest of us.
00:37:03
Speaker
but had their own separate meeting because they didn't want their professors to know that they had been going and engaging in such things as theory. They won, basically, and now in many of the big conferences, especially the regional ones that move around Germany, there will always be a theoretical session. And so a lot of the teaching and discussion of theory, rather than going on in a special conference or in the universities,
00:37:29
Speaker
It is largely being done at these regional conferences. And then, well, the British open system where I tried to symbolise the overlap of archaeology with these other subjects like geography and zoology and so on. But it's mainly, if you're putting an arrow in this, where things are expanding, it will be largely going from archaeology out into these other subjects.
Degree Evolution and Professional Development in Archaeology
00:37:55
Speaker
So archaeologists really invading these other subjects.
00:37:58
Speaker
And this is where terms like archaeobotany, archaeozoology, and so on come from, dealing with this new reality that we were dealing with in archaeology. When we look at the actual degree structures in these different countries, Britain were all familiar with the Bachelor in Archaeology, which we get after three years. And as I said, this is the normal entry point into the profession. We had destructured courses. There would be a defined curriculum
00:38:27
Speaker
different from one university to another. It wasn't a thing that was standardized, but the students would have a curriculum that they would have to follow with hopefully choices in it. And at the end, there would be a written examination, perhaps a small dissertation.
00:38:43
Speaker
Master's degrees were really unimportant. And if people wanted to go into an academic career, then the entry point there became the doctorate and the dissertation plus the viber. And if we look at what master's degrees, the development of those, they have changed very fundamentally their role within degrees structure.
00:39:07
Speaker
pre-1980s where I got my BA at Cambridge, and after two years, I was still not in prison or done anything to disgrace the university. So my college invited me in to have dinner and said, right, you can now have your master's degree. So I had to eat at dinner to get my master's, which makes some people a bit sick nowadays.
00:39:31
Speaker
The master's archaeology degrees, as I said, were mainly orientated towards people who were wanting to change subjects of the conversion degrees. And certainly at Cambridge, they were mainly oriented towards foreign students and especially the American market. So they were mainly for outsiders, although quite a number of people stayed on.
00:39:54
Speaker
in Edinburgh, a rather different set up that you could get your BA after three years in your examinations. But if you wanted to, you would stay on an extra year, do a dissertation and then get your masters. And then, as I mentioned, at places like Oxford in London, you had these conversion courses and with taking on people, especially with history or classics, first degrees. Incidentally, interesting to notice, there was no bachelor degree in archaeology in
00:40:24
Speaker
London for instance until the 1970s and in Cambridge until the 1980s. They were very slow in the take up compared to places like Sheffield. In the 1980s we then see the rise of the Masters courses which are more professional
00:40:42
Speaker
development. People were wanting to start moving up the system a bit more by getting their specialisms. So we'd start seeing master's degrees in environmental archaeology. There's a lot of competition went on between universities in setting up these master's degrees, trying to get post-graduates, which gave prestige and of course money.
00:41:07
Speaker
By 2008, when we were looking at the degree courses, there were 203 different degree courses in archaeology in Britain being taught at 41 different institutions. So a complete change from what the situation in even the 1960s and increasingly the entry point for the profession became the masters and for more and more people for the became
00:41:36
Speaker
the doctorate, although people would very often go away for a while, get their digging experience, and then come back to do their masters. Go now to Germany and look at what the traditional system was there. I mean, this was typical of large areas of Europe, especially northern Europe, and it's a so-called Humboldt system. And under this system, there was no fixed curriculum. The education was unstructured, and so each individual designed their own degree.
00:42:06
Speaker
Some people would do a magister, which would take five years, but this is unusual. Most people would be going to university for seven years, and so the doctorate became the main entry point into the profession.
00:42:21
Speaker
Denmark. Yes, my uncle Christian Christiansen. I was a member of his examination jury. We had a preliminary look at his thesis and said, well, can this be defended or not? And then without being allowed to alter anything or taking on to any of our comments, he had to go out and get it published. And once it was published, he had a public examination with a big party afterwards. And that is how he got his rehabilitation and
00:42:49
Speaker
was allowed to take over academic posts. Under the Humboldt system, it was normal to study at other universities. You'd have your home university and then you return there to present your thesis and have a viva
00:43:07
Speaker
But there was no written examination. The thesis was often based on material from rescue excavations and rescue research excavations from whatever land, whichever state you were working in, and usually working with the land is Denkmaalam. So some very good points about it, but other problems.
00:43:29
Speaker
To try and organize this, we then got the Bologna process. And this is the attempt in Europe to standardize university structures and teaching to allow this easy movement between countries. And it was started officially in 1999 with 26 countries taking part.
00:43:48
Speaker
But now across the world there are 49 countries involved in this and it was adopted around the world in places like Australia to again give their students the flexibility of being able to operate on the world market.
Archaeology as a Profession or General Education?
00:44:05
Speaker
And the system was essentially based on the Anglo-American university system. And the conversion within the European Union was supposed to have been completed by 2005. And the structure is the one that we are perhaps very familiar with. The bachelor for three years, the master's for two years, and the doctorate for three years.
00:44:31
Speaker
For many of these, there is a prefix curriculum, especially at the lower levels. But these are obviously adapted to the needs of each country and the expertise of universities. So it was not a completely standardized system. There was a certain amount of flexibility.
00:44:48
Speaker
But the examinations were a combination of written examinations plus dissertations. And for studying these things, the unit of currency was the European credit transfer and accumulation system, the ECTS. And this lies at the basis of all the equivalencies across Europe as to the value of examination of archaeological degrees.
00:45:15
Speaker
Now, this started raising problems. In Britain, as we've already said, you went to university to get your qualification. So we're looking here at the professional training for life. If you suddenly decided you wanted to change subject, this came to a failure, and you would have to go back to year one in whatever new subject you were going to take up. Whereas in Britain, we had no such expectation. As I said, it was for an education. And so movement across subjects was
00:45:44
Speaker
common if not even actually expected and very often happens at the point where you change from during the bachelor to the masters and the masters increasingly became something for research or for specialist training but was also used as a general degree
00:46:04
Speaker
for people who were wanting to go in perhaps the teaching or something like that, as we've already seen for conversion courses and people coming into subject and increasingly retired people who were just coming out of interest. But obviously there were then problems with places like Spain where there was no such thing as an archaeology degree. But there was a problem of the acceptance of other people with these new degrees. In Germany, as we've seen, the formal
00:46:32
Speaker
entrance into the profession was at minimum masters and usually at the doctoral level. The bachelor was not considered a degree at all. It was the sort of thing you would get as a technician. And so it was not accepted as it was here in Britain as the entry point to your career.
00:46:51
Speaker
whereas if you're going into Britain into one of these excavation posts, even into university, the bachelor was perfectly adequate to start one's career, although now, obviously, the masters is becoming more normal.
00:47:10
Speaker
But there are other small problems, like traditionally in English, most of the master's degree are one-year courses, not the two-year of the Bologna. And a few years ago, the EAA did a quick survey of universities and asking archaeology departments how many of them would accept a one-year English master's course.
00:47:31
Speaker
And there are quite a lot of who said, no, it's not adequate to enter into background for a PhD. So always check as to whether your degree is something you're going on to another university, whether they will actually accept your degree or not. So what we've seen going on is the abandonment of the Humboldt system, the 68
00:47:54
Speaker
years and unstructured courses. But one of the major problems is standardizing archaeology and different structures, names of university courses. And I think still some people are trying to sort out and the question of whether archaeology really is a subject in its own right.
00:48:12
Speaker
or part of another subject. And is it something which is only there for professional training, or is it there as a general degree for people who want to go into another profession? And certainly when we did a survey here in Sheffield of our undergraduates in early 1990s, we found a third of our students that we mentioned at Contact had gone into archaeology.
00:48:33
Speaker
a third had gone into schools teaching and a third had gone into other subjects. So amongst our graduates we have people like opera singers and so on.
Challenges and Closing Remarks
00:48:43
Speaker
Archaeology is looked upon as a sort of general training. So perhaps finish up with what is actually going on here in Sheffield and as we all know it is essentially it is a financial problem which is
00:48:57
Speaker
largely being caused by the government, first of all, wanting to charge more because of the shortfall in the repayment of loans, and also a problem of being able to attract students of the right level of examination passes.
00:49:13
Speaker
And it's a typical bean counter situation. They're looking at the entry and saying, well, we should be looking at the standard of students coming in. They're not looking at the output, what our students are actually doing when they go out and what they've achieved. And the problem here in Sheffield, there was no discussion with the professional bodies who are taking in these students, people like SIFA, who would know all about national occupation standards.
00:49:42
Speaker
And so, I'm afraid the hierarchy here of the university was just ignorant of what the requirements were to be an archaeologist. Graduates from these degree courses that are being proposed for Sheffield, they'd basically be unemployable in archaeology because they would not have the range of knowledge that is required under the national occupation standards.
00:50:07
Speaker
And of course they took no consideration of the financial and cultural impact of Sheffield and its region. But our problem now is how to deal with this committee, the University Executive Board, which is so ignorant it doesn't know it is ignorant and is simply refusing to listen.
00:50:24
Speaker
So for me, I mean, one of the problems that we have is we've been dancing to the agenda of the UEB and what I want to see us trying to do is to be setting up our own agenda based upon the huge public and visual support and just wondering how that can be done.
00:50:49
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology Now. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time!
00:51:13
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.