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060 - CIFA2018 - Alistair Galt
81 Plays6 years ago
At the CIFA2018 conference in Brighton, Tristan sits down with Alistair Galt to discuss the ins and outs of archaeology in the UK. Alistair is secretary of the New Generation Group of CIFA, dedicated to helping students and Early Career Professionals, mentoring and giving advice. We talk about the apparent shortage of archaeologists, the need to help yourself find the right job and what the reasons are to be optimistic in today's world of archaeology.
Contact details:[email protected].
Facebook: CIFA New generation special interest group.
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Transcript
Introduction to Alistair Galt and Conference Insights
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. So I am talking to, what are you called again? Alistair. Alistair Galt. You kind of work for AOC, but you also do a lot of other things. So I kind of want to focus, I mean, how have you found the conference so far? So far it's been, it's been entertaining.
00:00:25
Speaker
I arrived in the afternoon so I missed the early morning registration and the first speech, the first speech that they go to the main hall for. I arrived in the afternoon for the new generations meeting and also the early careers session and the session on transitioning from student to post-ex specialist
00:00:45
Speaker
So that was focusing on geo-archaeology. So that was nice to reflect on that part of the profession which doesn't really get talked about. This morning I
Challenges in Archaeology: Disconnect and Education Cuts
00:00:51
Speaker
was focusing on buildings archaeology because I quite like laser scanning and that sort of recorded heritage. And there was a lot of discussion about the fact there's a lot of disjoint between buildings and archaeology, mostly because developers and planners don't consider buildings to be archaeology itself. So it's been a good couple of hours so far.
00:01:08
Speaker
So you're actually part of the new generation. How much are you? Are you ahead of it? I can't remember. Not quite. I'm a secretary, so I have a fair amount of power within it. It's not to sound like a big take apart. Which I must say, it does sound like you're actually trying to take that on. Secretary-General. See, the thing is, what I've heard a lot of the time is about the need for archaeology to branch out further than it currently does. What's your opinion on that?
00:01:33
Speaker
So I do agree. So what we're trying to do within the New Generation special interest group to give it its full title, we are looking at ways of engaging with early career archaeologists and students in particular and we're looking to aim more towards students now. Given the last couple of years we've had cuts to funding for subjects for archaeology at A level and pre-university
00:01:54
Speaker
So there's no provision to actually learn about archaeology really outside of the Open University. And even then, it's extortion expensive now because of the rise in student fees. So a lot of people are being put off doing archaeology because it's not perceived to be a career worth chasing. And we got rid of A-level archaeology in England, didn't we? That was a bit of a mistake, wasn't it? Yes, that was... In your professional opinion and as representative of...
00:02:15
Speaker
No, I think I've mentioned this to start with, to be fair. In my professional capacity, yes, it was a bad decision because it means there's no provision now. I know I have met archaeologists who became teachers specifically to study the A11 archaeology. Conversely, I've met people in my university course who only got into archaeology because of the A level. So already I feel there is an impact. Lots of university departments are recording significant drops in student participation. Maybe not.
00:02:45
Speaker
say conclusively that the lack of provision of pre-18 year old levels of archaeology is directly influencing university degrees, but a lot of you guys had to cut courses, some of them had to close down. Wow, I say close down, that's a bit vicious, but definitely there is an impact onto
00:03:05
Speaker
the archaeology sector that we may not see for a few years yet, but it was definitely going to come through into the commercial archaeology. It will probably have an impact on what is already quite a stretch resource, but it's actually quite fundamentally important to the national economy.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, and I kind of want to go further with this kind of discussion of impacts and effects. Obviously, look,
Archaeologist Shortage and Communication Issues
00:03:26
Speaker
I've talked to a number of people who are in businesses, and they've told me about how they've had to kind of bring people forward a couple of steps. They've had to jump people through because they just don't have enough people. We have a shortage of archaeologists, which I never thought I would ever hear in my life.
00:03:46
Speaker
And I just wonder, this kind of moving forward often is contrasted with this idea that there's experience missing there. These are people who've had to do more work because of the work necessary, but they're missing out on stuff. And I want to know, how is that reflected in the new generation? How is it dealt with? I mean, this apprenticeship thing that English Heritage does, is that really what we want to do?
00:04:15
Speaker
Is there something different that we have to do? What is the new generation saying? So what we're saying, yeah, there's a lot of people do come from what I've heard. They don't just come to us. They also go to other forums as well and express their grievances. I was one of them, has to be said. I still technically am. But back when I was starting out, I always mowed and always applied for these various
00:04:39
Speaker
placements, particularly Sorry, Kingland. What was English Heritage back then? Oh, yeah. Back then. And they still run it to be fair. They still run. But the trouble is they only have one or two placements a year in either geospaces or in recording buildings or any other specialist subjects. So it's very competitive. So if you don't get it, you feel like somehow there's no other way through. So you do have to you do spend a lot of time sort of looking around just for placements and things. So it's hard.
00:05:08
Speaker
I would not lie, it was it's very demoralizing if you don't get that sort of thing, especially when you put in a lot of effort into the CV, you go for it and it just doesn't come up at all. But isn't it funny how you're saying it's moralizing not getting those things, but at the same time, the industry is saying we're crying out for archaeologists. So what is happening? What's happening? So where are these? Why is there seemingly a gap that's not being filled? That's the question.
00:05:34
Speaker
I think there's not enough communication between the organizations about where the situation is because I've heard conflicting statements from various people from other companies that, yes, one of them is that they were sort of archaeologists.
00:05:48
Speaker
Is it a shortage in general or is it a shortage in specific departments? Because I've heard most, I can probably say with some confidence that it's post-ex, which is suffering the most in terms of bone specialists and pottery, all these other sort of things that you do after you go from the field of all your fines. You don't have enough people there for the post-ex to actually go and actually analyze it. That's arguably the most important bit because they're the last people to handle the fines to make the right interpretation. If you don't have that experience, then your reports becomes a lot less
00:06:18
Speaker
that has a lot less clout behind it because you can't tell, say, anything beyond, like, possibly is it male or female? Because most archaeologists could probably tell you it's male or female, possibly the age, but they can't tell you the disease is on the bones and things like that. So that's a lot of information you're missing out on there, which is fundamental to the profession as a whole, and to the academic side as well.
00:06:39
Speaker
But we're quite unique in that we have a lot of, compared to other professions, we have a lot of overlap with our academic side. And for example, I'm giving papers on digital ontology to UP Association archaeologist September. That's not a plug at all, honestly. But that
Mentorship, Networking, and Recognition in HS2 Projects
00:06:55
Speaker
being said, so we do have a lot of
00:06:59
Speaker
people who work as commercial archaeologists, but also in the academic sector. So yesterday, the geo archaeology students pro sex, which was dealing with this topic, their advice is that people have just got to get out there and find a mentor, essentially. Now it's hard
00:07:15
Speaker
because you don't know where to go to start with. But it's good advice because it's tricky if you can catch people when they're young and get their little buds of interest in archaeology. Get them saying, you've got to get out there, volunteer, meet the people, get networking. It's fear of failure. There should be no fear to fail because you're so young at that stage. We won't criticize you at that stage. You're simply there to learn. They're more than happy to take you on if you just ask.
00:07:39
Speaker
They obviously can't dedicate months and months to you, but they can help you in so many ways, pointing in the direction of what books to read, who to contact, what's the best place to go to get the education that you want. It's going to be a bit tricky now if the university's split between vocational and purely academic.
00:07:57
Speaker
in that way. So we have to see how it develops in the next 10 years or so. But the thing you can do at the minute is just get out there and just find people in your profession, ask them what do I need to do to get to the level of your position just to get on the ladder. And PhD students have spoken to so many and they say the same thing. It is all about just getting yourself out there, getting that practical experience.
00:08:22
Speaker
finding the right people to talk to so they can help you further develop your career. So it's mostly just a lot of it sort of stealth initiative of giving yourself that time to go out there and develop your own skills at the same time having someone there to sort of help you sort of point you in the right direction.
00:08:40
Speaker
The problem, obviously, with self-driven stuff is that you need the resources yourself to do that. If you don't come from a well-off background, you obviously have to work all the time. Is there structural things to that? It does all sound a bit depressing, though. Is there something optimistic to be optimistic about in archaeology, heritage, and conservation in general? Is there something that you're optimistic about?
00:09:08
Speaker
I'm optimistic in terms of the the way that CFA is moving because now we've got massive projects like HS2 so we're being recognized as part of this integral structure of sort of when it comes to construction and sort of
00:09:24
Speaker
Ecology I say I say ecology because actually and when you go through and see why just who is about a lot of the lands They've bought out is actually not going to be developed. It's actually going to be for wildlife spaces. So not actually building on it They're actually doing a lot of projects on side of HS2, which are not
00:09:39
Speaker
which are not going to be environmentally detrimental, they're actually going to be positive impacts for the environment. So they're very conscious of their carbon footprint and their physical footprint as well. So archaeology is helping with that by using the Hurds document, the historic environment research development strategy, I think it's called. I hope I got that right. That is my thought.
00:10:01
Speaker
It is, but it's the overarching research documents for HS2. And it was Helen Glass, I think, or Helen Glover. She's the great London county archaeologist who's basically helped design all these documents for these huge infrastructure projects around the country. And she's been very good at it, to be fair. She's got all the specialists in from around the country to the help outs and county archaeologists to inform the local archaeology. So we've got this research strategy now for HS2.
00:10:29
Speaker
which is incredibly comprehensive. I've read it myself about bits of it anyway. And it's very well done. And it's something to aim for in that it makes us look like a profession that you want to be part of. It's, we can still be safer than a lot of other manual labor.
00:10:45
Speaker
industries. In the construction industry, they still have one death a week in the in-air industry. How that is still acceptable in the 21st century, I don't know. In archaeology, I can only remember one death in the profession in the last 10 years, and that case went to courts, and so I was still sort of confused about the impact of that particular court case. Overall, we're still a very safe profession.
00:11:05
Speaker
And you really want to point that out. We are safe. We are safe. We're an act. We're very, very positive in that front, at least. But in terms of, yeah, but by being more professional on top of that, we're looking to increase wages across the board because our work is recognized as being professional. Even if you're not necessarily a registered organization, the fact that archaeology is seen as increasingly an important resource for all of humanity and not just alongside the environments or ecologists and stuff.
00:11:33
Speaker
It's definitely seeing an increase. I'm seeing an increase. I can't obviously disclose how much I am. But I'm seeing that. The wages are going up. Initiatives like Badger's minima.
00:11:50
Speaker
the recommended, sorry, cephas recommended a minima, but advertised through Badger, generally, how most people see it. Their minima's are being accepted by most companies now. I mean, you get your trainees and apprenticeships through Badger as well, or at least advertised through Badger through big companies like Hotswolds and Headland. So they're doing, they are doing their bit gradually. It's a slow change. And with all these major
Future Engagement Plans for Young Archaeologists
00:12:09
Speaker
shifts or paradigm changes to use the academic balance.
00:12:14
Speaker
It's going to take time, unfortunately. So we're not going to see results overnight, but it'll be a gradual change, it'll be positive. And I hope that a new generation can be involved in that in some way, particularly looking at students now, telling them what you can do in advance of that. And so, to be fair, the younger generation, like three 18-year-olds, they're actually quite positive about their chances, despite all the doom and gloom that you see in the papers about their prospects. So I am positive as a result of all these various developments.
00:12:42
Speaker
And if somebody wants to get in contact with New Generation, what are you guys doing? Do you have anything planned? You said you just had a meeting here at the conference. Do you have other meetings? How are they done? So what we do, we try to do face-to-face meetings.
00:12:59
Speaker
as often as possible. But because we're all spread out over the country and we embrace technology quite a lot, we use Skype quite a bit for our meetings. AGMs we kind of have to do in person. But in terms of what we do in the meetings, we discuss our plans going forward. So we're contacting the Council of British Archaeology about some collaboration because they have a lot of members who might be interested in what we do.
00:13:22
Speaker
and we can help them direct them towards resources. The other plans, because we've just had a new representative from SIFA join and replace the old one, just because they've had a bit of restructuring in SIFA. So now Anna Welsh rather than Leanne Burney, who's our representative from SIFA, on the board. So she's come along with all these great ideas and we hope to take her ideas on board and go from there, because we hope to have a presence at the University Archaeology Day in the British Museum, which is that June or July,
00:13:53
Speaker
It's some time in the summer, I know that much. I know it's the second ever University Archaeology Day, which is a great idea. It's got a lot of potential. I heard it was a, it was a fairly sound success, but there was a lot of room for improvements. But then there's always, there always is for these things. So yeah, we're looking to have a presence there and get young people into the profession through and tell them why we exist as a professional body.
00:14:18
Speaker
because ultimately, New Generation represents SIFA and what we do within that. And then going forward from there, we have a presence at the European Association of Archaeologists as well. We've got a session going on there too, which I will probably be at because I'm also presenting a paper at another session. So, yeah, it's a busy life. Good stuff. Yes, that's what we're doing in the next few months. Perfect. That sounds great. Thank you very much, Alistair.
00:14:46
Speaker
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 chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.