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Has Groupthink & Gatekeeping Choked Public Archaeology Campaigning?- WB 30th Nov 2021
89 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to Watching Brief. As the name implies, each week Marc (Mr Soup) & Andy Brockman of the Pipeline (Where history is tomorrow's news) cast an eye over news stories, topical media and entertainment and discuss and debate what they find.
0:00 Introduction
2:36 ‘A Perfect Storm’?
8:00 Effect on Archaeology?
15:00 New Campaigns Emerge
26:05 The Sector’s Reponse
36:49 GB News Blunder
41:23 Torpedoed?
44:40 The Next Challenge?
53:09 Groupthink & Ways Forward…
***
Link of the Week:
Unite Against Cultural Vandalism Rally:
***
the Big Read: TORPEDOED! HOW ESTABLISHMENT MOVED TO BLOCK INDEPENDENT CAMPAIGN TO SAVE BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY:
Department for Education Defunding Archaeology in 43 UK Universities! - WB Feb 2021:
Sheffield Shock Closure: Staff & Students Speak! - WB 27th May 2021:
‘Unlawful’, Myopic, Moronic & Macho Management in Archaeology (Various News) – WB 25th June 2021:
Worcestershire Course off the Menu as Uni Ends Archaeology - WB 20th Aug 2021:
Advertising or Accountability? Archaeology Needs Critical Friends in the Media! - WB 12th Oct 2021:
Parthenon Marbles Return “Up to British Museum”! & Why is Archaeology Pay So BAD? – WB 19th Nov 2021:
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Soupcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Soupcast, coming to you from Archaeosoup Towers. By popular demand, we're taking selected videos from the Archaeosoup back catalogue and bringing them to you as convenient podcasts. As the name implies, with Archaeosoup you get a bit of everything thrown into the pot. Archaeology, discussion, humour and debate. You can find out more at archaeosoup.com. So sit back, relax and enjoy our hearty helping of Archaeosoup.
Delays and Serious Topics
00:00:36
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to Watching Brief for the week or rather the weeks of the 22nd and now the 29th of November. We've been a touch delayed compared to our schedule due to well waiting on responses from key individuals with regards to this week's topic.
Professionalism in UK Archaeology
00:00:59
Speaker
I'm joined as ever by my amazing co-host Mr Andy Brockman and this week there's no joke in terms of who he is and what he is or how he is because the topic of this week's watching brief is a very serious one. It's one that we've been building up to now for weeks, months and in some ways thematically I think years.
00:01:20
Speaker
and it builds on specifically a couple of recent watching briefs where we've discussed for example what we call the quality of archaeology in this country, that is to say the quality of being an archaeologist, the experiential nature of being an archaeologist in the sector, but also as well a watching brief from a few episodes ago where we asked the question
00:01:45
Speaker
Does archaeology need friends and allies or does it actually need critical friends, particularly when it comes to the media and interactions with the broader world, for example, environmental campaigning and government in particular?
00:02:00
Speaker
And so with these things in mind, today's watching brief is examining, I suppose, competence and I suppose professionalism in the leadership of UK archaeology. It's asking questions and crucially asking questions as critical friends. So with that in mind, I'm going to hand over now to Andy to get us going.
00:02:32
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Yeah, this is a companion piece, if you like, to a big read investigation that is about to be published on the pipeline website. It has its origins in events in the world of the UK, higher education and archaeology and higher education over the course of this year, really 2021.
00:02:55
Speaker
And it looks at the interaction between a number of different bodies. Established bodies like the Council for British Archaeology, University Archaeology UK, which looks after academic archaeology departments.
00:03:11
Speaker
and represents them and the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists in particular and their relationships with two campaigning bodies, Dig for Archaeology and the Campaign to Save British Archaeology which was an independent campaign which was started in the summer.
00:03:30
Speaker
And it was the reaction to that campaign which really set us off to look at this particular story. Because on the 28th of August, the director of the campaign to save British archaeology, Chris Whitwood, appeared on the digital channel GB News in an interview with the presenter Neil Oliver.
Campaigns to Save British Archaeology
00:03:51
Speaker
that provoked a quite severe pushback from parts of archaeological Twitter, along with lines of what was this person doing representing archaeology on what is seen as a right of centre news channel, which is not popular in terms of its worldview with a lot of UK archaeologists. And by the way, why was he representing himself as saving British archaeology when he's not even an archaeologist?
00:04:17
Speaker
Now, we'll come back to that, won't we? We'll come back to that. Indeed, in the course of what follows. But we started asking questions about, okay, what was this campaign? How has it come about? Why has it come about? Because we were also hearing from other sources that there was some questioning of the amount of support that, for example,
00:04:42
Speaker
threatened archaeology departments were getting from the central bodies like the CBA and even from what was supposed to be a campaigning body doing for archaeology. So we started asking some questions and really what follows in the rest of the watching brief today is what we've discovered. Now the story begins back in January
00:05:07
Speaker
when the then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson made an announcement that the government was cutting back on higher level, what's called C1 funding for university archaeology departments. That's the funding that enables things like lab work and field work to go ahead, the things that are more expensive.
00:05:25
Speaker
That money was going to be withdrawn 50% straight away and then more in future because the government, as the announcement at the time went, no longer considered archaeology a strategically important subject. That is in spite of the fact that the home office treats archaeology as a shortage profession in terms of visas for people coming in from outside of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So there appeared to be a bit of a disconnect there anyway.
00:05:51
Speaker
Then, as the month went on, it became clear that a number of archaeology departments were under threat. The University of Chester, which we'll hear more about in due course, academic posts and support posts were under threat of compulsory redundancy.
00:06:09
Speaker
The University of Worcester course was under threat of complete cancellation with the loss of all the academic jobs and the threat to the current students and including research students who might not even have the staff there to complete the courses that they signed up for.
00:06:28
Speaker
And then the event that really, I think, shook the UK archaeology world to its roots, which was the announcement that Sheffield University, which has an archaeology department that's 50 years old and is regarded as world leading, well certainly has been regarded as world leading, it's incredibly influential, very successful in particular in fields like zoo archaeology.
00:06:50
Speaker
and lab-based work, that that department was under threat of possibly of total closure, certainly of what's basically an evisceration. And these were announcements that were being made on financial grounds by the university management.
00:07:10
Speaker
Very incidentally, all of these stories are stories that we've covered during the course of this year, including, for example, the Department for Education threatening to cut funding, this kind of thing, we covered this in watching brief, will include links to those particular episodes below, but also obviously you can find them in the playlist.
00:07:26
Speaker
Crucially, this week's link of the week is in reference to a planned rally that's coming this week, which is part of the ongoing fallout at Sheffield and the response by archaeologists and academics to those decisions. In broadly speaking, this has been the big bubble of stories that have dominated, in particular this year in archaeology.
00:07:54
Speaker
That's right. Now what we're going to look at now for the rest of the show is how those incidents, those threats
00:08:05
Speaker
interacted with the world of British archaeology and particularly the management and representative bodies in British archaeology and how satisfactory or not that interaction was and if things went wrong why they might have gone wrong and how they might have gone wrong. Now as you watch this I need to make absolutely clear on behalf of both the pipeline and of watching brief
00:08:28
Speaker
we're not endorsing any of the organisations that we mention and we're certainly not endorsing either dig for archaeology or the campaign to save British archaeology. This is a neutral investigation into what happened and we're publishing it in the pipeline and discussing it here because we think it raises important issues that archaeologists need to address. So with that in mind
00:08:55
Speaker
We'll go back to really the spring of 2021 when the University of Chester was initially under threat of compulsory redundancy among its archaeology academics and other academics in the humanities and other departments. It has to be said, this is not just an issue around archaeology, although that's our principal focus.
00:09:17
Speaker
One of the academics who was most closely involved in the fight back against those cuts and against those redundancies is a well-known archaeologist called Professor Howard Williams and we talked to Howard earlier and this is what he had to say about the state of archaeology and the threats to archaeology as he saw them
00:09:43
Speaker
in the spring of 2021, early summer of 2021. And his argument that what the sector was facing at the time was an unprecedented, a perfect storm really of threats coming over the horizon. This is what Howard said.
00:09:57
Speaker
I have been, I did my PhD and then was teaching as a lecturer in archaeology in the first instance, then senior lecturer and then professor later on as another institution, but I've been teaching since 1999. So that's, I don't know how many years, you know, 23 years or so teaching in academic archaeology, and there have been instances where
00:10:19
Speaker
departments are being you hear rumors you hear direct evidence from people's mouths a lot of it's behind the scenes so we don't always get a clear sense but you do get a sense of when cuts are happening and when closures are happening are really exceptional news you know so
00:10:35
Speaker
The small department I first joined it, you know, University HE sector in was Trinity College, Camardan, which had its height in the early 90s, about six members of staff. But when I joined it had three, after I left, it was down to two, then one, then nothing. So a small, slow decline of a relatively small unit.
00:10:54
Speaker
and that we had Newport in 2005. We had a massive catastrophic cut at Birmingham in 2012. So these are one set, you know, these are not common events. So there's no way you can characterize my own experience. Obviously, I was threatened with at risk of redundancy in my own university in April of this year. And therefore, I started being more intensely aware because my job was on the line. But then,
Crisis at Sheffield University
00:11:23
Speaker
when during that period when I was at risk Sheffield also announced it was closing not simply cutting for us we were looking at losing one or two posts perhaps and we ended up losing one person to early retirement and we're okay now the union fought and it could fight and we fought a good fight but when we heard that Sheffield was actually planning to close its long-running department this is you know anybody that was reticent about joining and being vocal in support of Chester should have been
00:11:50
Speaker
Absolutely. Any doubts should have been blown away at that very moment that this was a crisis moment for UK HE archaeology provision. There's no dispute. There's no qualifier there. You can say Sheffield has had its ups and downs. Every archaeology department has its ups and downs. You can say, well, there's been a longer story of Sheffield's troubles. You can victim blame in whatever way you like. But at the end of the day, this was a catastrophic moment of a well-renowned department announcing its closure.
00:12:19
Speaker
And certainly much of the archaeological world responded to that closure. Yes, accurately. There was a flurry of activity on social media, a massively successful petition that was started by one of the students at Sheffield Lee in hand. But how do you think the representative bodies in the sector like the Council for British Archaeology, Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, and particularly University Archaeology
00:12:48
Speaker
UK. How did how did they respond to those threats in your experience? In my experience and is a very particular experience because I was literally at risk myself. I found it was varied. We wrote to a number of these organizations requesting support. I wrote on behalf of my colleagues to write to our vice chancellor and many of them did respond. Some were quick off the mark and wrote fantastic pieces that made the case
00:13:18
Speaker
in our defence. Others were slower and perhaps were busy and looking to see how things unfolded. But when Sheffield, the news of Sheffield happened, they also wrote in. So I think all of these organisations did us at Chester a great service and I think there was a lot of media attention. They did us proud in terms of
00:13:40
Speaker
joining the chorus of this has got to stop and writing very specific as we requested. We didn't do an open call for help because we wanted the right voices and the right way to write in to our management, our senior management. And they all, not everyone responded, but a number of them that you've mentioned responded and wrote fantastic letters from their own perspective. So from my perspective, I felt
00:14:05
Speaker
well supported and I was actually overwhelmed by the massive support from amateurs, from professionals, academics and so on. But I would say that there was reluctance from some quarters to see the Chester threat of a few jobs being lost as anything serious. And I did feel a degree of frustration within the academics sector itself. There was a sense that, well,
00:14:35
Speaker
Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Now I can't put a finger on that and I don't want to sort of name names, but there was a sense of silence from many quarters, which was thrown into sharp relief with the noise from many other academic colleagues and from professionals, commercial, museum, governmental. Normally people who would stay quiet were vocal. Right. So, so far so good, I suppose. Archaeologists, particularly in the academic realm,
00:15:01
Speaker
felt as though there was something of a crisis, although some didn't want to call it a crisis. And actually, these representative bodies were responding. The system works, I suppose. Was anything else required?
00:15:19
Speaker
I think the problem came in terms of follow-up, because although the Chester redundancies were largely withdrawn, in fact, in the end, the department got away with one voluntary redundancy that many more compulsory redundancies and redundancies had originally been threatened.
00:15:43
Speaker
By the early to middle summer, Worcester was certainly under threat and Sheffield was under extreme threat. And there was a sense, I think, that something more was required because other things were going on in the archaeological world. The government was proposing, for example, a planning bill
00:16:05
Speaker
which, as it was being presented at the time, would almost certainly have meant a cutting back of two things. One is a local voice in the planning process altogether, which has impacts on things like placemaking and so on, which archaeologists these days are very much involved in, the idea that local heritage adds to a sense of identity and worth to the places people live.
00:16:29
Speaker
And the other one is that they would grow back on the environmental checks, including environmental checks that would be required before planning permission was granted for a new development. So, for example, develop funded
00:16:47
Speaker
developer-funded archaeology, there might be less of it and it might come either earlier in the process or later in the process when it was much less effective and much less comprehensive. And the idea was it was something to be got rid of as quickly as possible because it was an inconvenience to developers. Now, that and a number of other things that we go into in the article were going on alongside the academic issues. So you have a general sense of a sector feeling under threat
00:17:17
Speaker
Take for archaeology was a response to that. It was initially set up by Dr. Chloe Duckworth of Newcastle University, who I know is a good friend of archaeo soup.
00:17:28
Speaker
and people might be familiar for her role as a lead presenter on the Great British Dig on on television at the moment. And also David Connolly, the director of the British Archaeological Jobs Resource, which is a private body but quite an influential one in terms of advocating for particularly again
00:17:50
Speaker
professional archaeologist in the developer-funded sector. Our understanding is that when the idea for dig for archaeology was mooted, there were discussions had put it no stronger than that.
00:18:09
Speaker
with leading bodies in the sector, including the CBA, Council for British Archaeology, and the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, and the Federation for Archaeological Managers and Employers, which represents the large contracting units who do most of the developer-funded work.
00:18:28
Speaker
To put it mildly, suggestions were made that Dig4Archaeology didn't campaign outside of the already existing campaigns of SIFA, CBA, FAME, and that in fact it certainly didn't campaign independently.
00:18:51
Speaker
and its role was better suited to being that of basically a PR operation saying good things about archaeology and trying to get public coverage, media coverage of good things about archaeology, which had some success in the articles in the Guardian. There was an appearance, for example, on Radio 4's Westminster Hour, where the issue was discussed with politicians. So it did have some success as a campaign. But the suggestion is it wasn't
00:19:17
Speaker
the strong grassroots campaign that maybe some people thought it either was going to be or should have been right at the beginning. And in fact, what it is, is a mouthpiece for the CBA and fame and SIFA. So it's just an additional means of them saying archaeology is wonderful at motherhood and apple pie. Now onto this arena.
00:19:43
Speaker
with a sense that maybe the sector isn't doing as much as it could do proactively to campaign using methods like the mass signature petitions, which, for example, Sheffield had a huge success with. We spoke to a student, Liam Hand, who set up their petition and they were pushing 50,000 signatures. That is five times more than five times the number of people who actually work in professional archaeology in the UK.
00:20:11
Speaker
So there's a potential much wider reach than the existing bodies seem to be wanting to go for.
00:20:22
Speaker
There's a much wider catchment of people who might want to support archaeology. And into that arena came Chris Whitwood. Chris Whitwood is based in Yorkshire. He's a trained schoolteacher. He's a graphic designer. He's a political activist with something called the Yorkshire Party, which advocates for better regional representation and support.
00:20:43
Speaker
for Yorkshire as a region, regional politics is something that's growing in the UK at the moment and the Yorkshire party is a manifestation of that. But also he says he's been a lover of archaeology since he was a child and he brought in the early summer his experience as a political activist and a communications person
00:21:09
Speaker
to the idea of something which he called the campaign to save British archaeology. This was set up to be, strictly speaking, a single issue operation, which was about advocating for those threatened university departments.
00:21:33
Speaker
And he set up a website in consultation with a number of professional academic archaeologists, including Professor Williams and others departments under threat.
Chris Whitwood's Campaign Strategies
00:21:47
Speaker
and the department and those academics were advising him on the content of his website and so on. He succeeded in getting a letter into current archaeology magazine. He also got coverage in Times Higher Ed, coverage on the BBC over the Worcester department, the threatened closure at the Worcester department, and Worcester course.
00:22:14
Speaker
And he was also talking to people at Sheffield. So he was starting to bring together a network, a campaigning network to advocate the university archaeology. And it should be said, it should be said in that sense, then it was that was a civilian
00:22:30
Speaker
deciding to take up the cause of academic archaeology and having an approach informed by his other experiences and professional interests. That's right. And to give our viewers a flavour of how this came about, we asked Professor Howard Williams how he came to be involved with Chris Whitwood's campaign to save British archaeology.
00:22:58
Speaker
I got a direct message from Chris saying, giving a brief introduction to his background, a social media direct message, can I share with you some of the things I'm doing? And I said, okay, but you've got to, and would you be willing to offer your support? And I said, anyone that's willing to offer support, I'm willing to back. And I didn't say that with an uncritical eye. I said, as an academic, I'm always approached by people outside of the profession.
00:23:27
Speaker
and to ask questions that range from perhaps media inquiries, pseudo archaeologists, all sorts of interesting characters. I'm not uncritical of who approaches me, but I did a check with my own sources and saw his political background. I thought this might be someone worth at least finding out what he's going to do.
00:23:46
Speaker
So I said yeah okay and I'm happy to put my name forward but I put the qualifier that I said like every individual academic we're all divisive characters and if my name alone is on the ticket of your campaign that would only put some of the people off so make sure you get a range of folks you know joining in. So we had a conversation so I think 26th of June
00:24:06
Speaker
various points through July well not a lot so I mean I didn't share a lot of information with him it was more just he said couldn't you see my draft website I'm set up and I said yeah there's a couple of errors though you know can I just point these out but I wasn't sort of um you know
00:24:22
Speaker
behind the scenes orchestrating anything I just said yeah here's a few points you might want to be aware of this just a few pointers and I said to him everything he did made sense it was independent it was outside of the profession the academic sector sure and that showed in the fact they didn't know precisely all the details of what goes on but he had he was willing to take advice and he was willing to listen
00:24:45
Speaker
And he was clearly not listening to me uncritically because he made it absolutely candid that he would be in touch with a range of other academics and listening to different views, probably because he was wanting to ensure that I wasn't giving him just one take on what's going on. And as any canny politician or campaigner would do, he was taking multiple sources of advice. That was my sense of it.
00:25:09
Speaker
So through July, I was supporting him 28th of July, I think it was, he launched his website all there abouts. And by that point, he'd already got a piece in various places in support of the Worcester news when the Worcester announced it was shutting its archaeology. He was on the local BBC news, he'd written into the current archaeology magazine. So I thought this was a promising
00:25:35
Speaker
archaeology that would complement the broader campaigning of dig for archaeology on the planning side and on the commercial side. And I thought there was a mileage in this and it didn't do any harm to offer it support and give him a bit of advice. But I can't proclaim I put a lot of time, didn't give Chris a lot of time. I was busy with so many other things. But I did give him, you know, and I looked over a few things for him during that month. Soon after the website went live on the 20th of July,
00:26:04
Speaker
I did get a few direct communications and I was saying, who is this guy? Isn't he doing what dig for archaeology you're doing?
00:26:13
Speaker
And I was on the back foot and I thought, hang on, have I missed a trick here? Is there something about his background or his character that is dodgy? Is there something wrong that I've missed? And I've been a bit of a muppet by putting my name on something which is easily done with goodwill and good faith and it's something dubious about it. And I had done my checking and I responded and I outlined to those individuals my limited involvement that I simply was putting a name and image to
00:26:39
Speaker
And a quote I had written a piece about my perspective on the future of the subject area and how important archaeology is. And I said, that's limited my involvement. And I said, please contact Chris directly. He is the campaigner.
00:26:53
Speaker
if you have any questions. You know, I can't speak for him. I'm not running the website. I'm not doing anything. I'm not a campaigner. I am, I would merely put forward my name, a quote, and gave him a photograph myself in my office from a few years ago. You know, that was the limit. So I did respond positively. So what's your problem? What's your, what is the issue here? And they couldn't put a finger on it. And then a couple of them conceded that they'd been approached by others, making noise about the campaign.
00:27:21
Speaker
and that's why they're asking me. So it's fair to say that some archaeologists appear to have questions at the very least with regards to the campaign to save British archaeology so-called.
00:27:35
Speaker
That's right. The whole thing was brought to a head by an email from Professor Chris Gerrard at Durham University, who is the current chair of University Archaeology UK.
00:27:54
Speaker
The context for this is that earlier CBA and CIFA had issued curiously similarly worded statements about dig for archaeology, where they'd welcome dig for archaeology as a campaign, but as a campaign to increase media coverage, not as anything else. And they'd also made the point that a lot of their advocacy takes place behind closed doors, out of sight of the public.
00:28:22
Speaker
and they can't always talk about it. What now happened, it appears, and we've got documentary evidence to demonstrate this, is that Professor Gerard of University Archaeology UK and Neil Redfern of the CBA
00:28:51
Speaker
had a conversation. They had a conversation about a month after the Whitwood campaign had started and certainly they were aware of it because we know that a member of staff from the CBA reached out to Professor Williams and asked, what is this campaign you're involved in?
00:29:13
Speaker
what do you know about it? And crucially, is it quotes legit? Now, there was now pretty much a month went by when they when CFA CBA could have reached out to Chris Whitwood. We've seen you started this campaign. What are you doing? Can we work together? Can we help? Or can how can you help us?
00:29:39
Speaker
What happened instead, at the end of August, 26th of August, Neil Redford, the CBA, texted Howard Williams at Chester, who he knew had been in contact with Chris Whitwood and was named on Chris Whitwood's campaign and said, quote, I'm keen to understand what you know about it. That is Chris Whitwood's campaign, say, British archaeology. And this is the critical quote, how legitimate it is.
00:30:09
Speaker
Now, at this point, Redfern has known about the campaign for nearly a month, but there's been no attempt to contact Whitwood. Then there appears to have been a conversation between Neil Redfern and Professor Chris Gerard of Durham University, who is also the current Chair of University Archaeology UK, representing Academic Archaeology departments.
00:30:33
Speaker
And Gerard then wrote an email which was circulated to all of UA UK's members. So potentially that's 32 academic departments and some into three figures of academic archaeologists could have seen this.
00:30:51
Speaker
And what Gerard wrote was the following, quote, I want to draw your attention to this website and voice some concerns. Now, again, he's voicing concerns. There has been no contact with Chris Whitwood at this point. So the concerns are based on no contact with the individual who's actually on the campaign.
00:31:14
Speaker
They then link to the campaign website, savearchaeology.co.uk. And then it continues, quote, having just spoken to Neil Redfern at CBA, we want to reassure you that the author has not been in touch with either of us. As far as we know, he has no archaeological background. No governance details are provided, and yet, as you will see, donations are being asked for.
00:31:41
Speaker
I know he has been in contact with some archaeologists through social media and some of your staff may well be included.
00:31:48
Speaker
Now that was taken as basically warning off academic departments from having anything to do with Chris Whitwood's campaign. It goes so far as to certainly pass on the innuendo through mentioning the donation button, but maybe it's some sort of scam to obtain money. Oh, incidentally, I should say at this point, we have a Patreon.
00:32:16
Speaker
That's the point I was about to make. Pretty much every website these days has a donation button to try and cover costs at the very least. It's not unusual and it's certainly not a marker of a scam. If you get the email from the African prince saying there's been a coup and would you look after six million dollars for me, that's probably a scam.
00:32:38
Speaker
Starting a website to campaign for university archaeology, when you're open about what you're trying to do and you're fully visible on, for example, LinkedIn, chances are that's probably less likely to be a scam.
00:33:00
Speaker
they appear to be trying to warn off the rest of the archaeology sector for no good reason than they hadn't reached out to have a discussion with Whitwood and he wasn't an archaeologist. Yeah. And that was it. He's not an archaeologist. Now it should be said that at this time
00:33:18
Speaker
all of these bodies ostensibly were reaching out to the public asking them to for example contact their MP to support archaeology and to hopefully raise a little bit of awareness amongst the public as to the goods that archaeology does and continues to do in this country. So is this a case of we want you to care but don't care so much as to start campaigning especially if you're not an archaeologist?
00:33:47
Speaker
I think it's more subtle and yet more blatant even than that because the Gerard email concluded with the following observations and I'm quoting again. It said, while we perceive as being archaeology under threat, I feel strongly we must not talk up a quote crisis.
00:34:07
Speaker
And we need to continue to stress the good things we all do and the contributions that we make. And that's what Dig for Archaeology was being steered towards doing, not campaigning, but just saying the good stuff, saying the motherhood and apple pie stuff.
00:34:24
Speaker
And then Gerard concluded that he, quotes, feared the sector was in danger of providing a fragmented picture of lobbying and advocacy, which in my limited experience will win no arguments at all.
00:34:38
Speaker
Now I should say here that we submitted a series of questions to Professor Gerrard, to the CBA near Redfern, and to the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. Now of those, Professor Gerrard and the University of Durham chose not to respond, not to make any comment. They told us they did not wish to comment.
Communication Challenges in Advocacy
00:35:01
Speaker
The CBA
00:35:04
Speaker
said that the email and the conversation with Neil Redfern represented due diligence and that there was nothing inappropriate or legally reckless about it, that it was simply an attempt to obtain information from people like Professor Williams who'd been involved in the campaign and might have been involved in the campaign.
00:35:29
Speaker
Sifa went a bit further and a spokesperson for Sifa told us that they were concerned that contacts they built up in Westminster, in Whitehall, in Holyrood, at the Welsh Assembly and other representative and industry bodies and so on might be put at jeopardy by inappropriate messaging
00:35:56
Speaker
and alternative contacts, and that their access to government couldn't be taken for granted. It appears, therefore, I would suggest, and we suggest in the article, that the archaeological establishment would be prepared to
00:36:23
Speaker
hobble at the very least, independent campaigners rather than have them generate coverage and potentially access to the media and access to, for example, MPs at Westminster, which they can't control the messaging.
00:36:44
Speaker
Now, at this point, is it worthwhile mentioning the great sin that apparently was done by this civilian campaigner in reaching out to a portion of the media that, frankly, I wouldn't reach out to if he paid me? But unless he did, he appeared on Neil Oliver's show on GB News. And that wasn't great. That wasn't a great idea, was it? Especially not for archaeologists.
00:37:16
Speaker
I'm not going to take sides here. What I am going to observe is that what Chris Whitwood told me in writing the article was that he stood by appearing on GB news because if you're trying to generate media coverage
00:37:31
Speaker
then you need to talk to audiences that don't necessarily always reflect the audience that would naturally go to you, that would naturally listen to you. And particularly if that audience happens to be broadly speaking aligned with the people who are actually empowered to make decisions. And it's certainly the case that GB News love it or loathe it and off camera personally, I might give you an opinion.
00:38:02
Speaker
But GB News represents a certain part of the media spectrum which is noticed by certain parts of the government in power, the Boris Johnson's conservative government, and particularly the element that likes to play to the so-called culture war. So breaking through to that audience and putting forward
00:38:29
Speaker
a message advocating archaeology in universities, which is all Whitfield did. He didn't advocate not pulling down statues or being against the proper reassessment of colonial history or anything like that. It was about the campaign. Well, he also, to his credit, didn't fall into any of the narrative traps that
00:38:50
Speaker
the now, I would say, former archaeologist Neil Oliver Lake, for example, saying, you know, a lot of people in this country losing touch with their heritage, clearly pushing that essentially alt-right agenda. He didn't take that bait. So Neil, again, we're not going to go into the problems with Neil Oliver. He is a problematic person. But this is not what happened on that appearance.
00:39:15
Speaker
No, and what did happen following that appearance and Whitwood does say he was somewhat taken aback by the strength of the pushback that he'd gone from the archaeological social media, which was aggressive to the extent that actually he... Well, for some it was sufficient simply to screen grab
00:39:38
Speaker
that he is appearing on this show and send it to people. That was enough. Yeah, exactly.
00:39:46
Speaker
Leaving aside the precise issues of GB News and again another leading archaeologist, Rachid Dave, tweeted that she had also been approached to probably take part in the same show and eventually turned it down and said she couldn't bring herself to appear on GB News, which is absolutely legitimate for her to make that decision.
00:40:09
Speaker
On the other hand, other archaeologists, including Alex Hildred of the Mary Rose Museum and the current head of the Mary Rose Museum, have also appeared on the Oliver Show without the same level of pushback. So, you know, I think you can certainly argue that what we saw here in the case of Chris Whitwood was that aggressive pushback was a case of shooting the messenger. And it is possible certainly that some people took who
00:40:36
Speaker
opposed the idea of an independent campaign led by a non-archaeologist, just took the GB news appearance as the green light to, you know, it was pressed the green light and go to the extent that we would took his social media history to account private. And
00:40:57
Speaker
And in the days that followed, both voluntarily to protect people, but also having people requesting him to have their details taken down and endorsements removed. The personal endorsements from his website are now gone.
00:41:18
Speaker
So, and then in fact, we asked how Williams about this too. We asked how he responded to Chris Whitwood's comment, which he made to me in the course of writing the article, that the campaign had been, as Whitwood put it, torpedo from within by some certain archaeological bodies and certain archaeologists and why they reacted the way they did. And this is what Professor Williams said.
00:41:46
Speaker
they'd been almost, whether they were aware of it or not, set up to put pressure on me in some way. And I thought, not much about it. I thought, well, you know, I'm new to this campaigning lark. This is the kind of weird thing that happens. People I know from social media, you'd hardly talk to me rocking up in my DM saying, hi, Howard, what's all this about? And one of them that did that actually went, oh, I'll put my name to the campaign now that you explained that it's good. And I understand what you're talking about and I will contact Chris.
00:42:15
Speaker
So one of them did do that and then, sorry, they must have been convinced by talking to Chris, not to me, but they took my lead of talking to Chris and then, yeah, that makes sense. That's good news. That does something different from other activities, individual academic department campaigns, and then dig for archaeology. I'll support that.
00:42:33
Speaker
and I mean it's not as if I had to sign up or anything you know it's just giving a bit of information and an image and so at that point I thought nothing of it really I thought that's just the way it goes and then the month went by and then I you know
00:42:49
Speaker
I got an approach directly for a conversation about this issue. So I don't know the motives, but I haven't answered your question. I don't know the motives for this, but I suspect he is an outsider. He has political links. Therefore, ironically, we want to play this game in archaeology. We want to criticize the media. We want to criticize politicians. We want them to listen to us, but we don't want to be associated with them. And I think maybe there is a
00:43:18
Speaker
perhaps a little bit of childishness in the academic profession and the commercial sector about our relationships with the media and politicians, that we can get away without getting our hands dirty. I mean, so I wonder whether the idea that, oh, actually here is someone with political experience, here is someone actually willing to give his time and energies to
00:43:35
Speaker
supports academic archaeology. What's the catch? I think that might be the starting point. If then people want to feed that suspicion with more noise, then I think it's easy. People can be easily swayed into thinking there's something dodgy going on, when actually I couldn't find anything dodgy going on.
00:43:58
Speaker
Maybe just down that I'm a huge mug and naive and there was some big gain to swindle me out of millions or to trick the profession by setting up a campaign, which was then the implication given in communications to me by certain leaders in our field.
00:44:14
Speaker
But I couldn't sniff it out and I certainly couldn't see anything but goodwill going on here after having three months of literally hell in my job going through a redundancy process where I had so much love and goodwill from outside. I was more than happy to accept someone thinking this is a serious business, actually believing that archaeology is worth saving and wanting to put a bit of effort into it. Obviously this is a pretty unhappy story.
00:44:39
Speaker
It's about communications and more than anything, it's about breakdowns in communications and perhaps confusion about what is actually wanting to be communicated.
00:44:50
Speaker
And I think it's unfortunate, doubly so, because archaeology is still under threat. Now we're speaking on the eve of industrial action by the University College Union at Sheffield, which is in dispute about the cuts at the archaeology department. There are rumours swirling around. You only have to talk to anybody connected with the University of Archaeology and there are rumours swirling around about who's next.
00:45:20
Speaker
Yes.
Successful Campaigns and Strategic Planning
00:45:23
Speaker
And so we although there have been one or two wins like for example that high-level funding was restored by the government, we are still in a very febrile, very fragile political situation as regards to university archaeology in particular and archaeology in general.
00:45:48
Speaker
We did ask Howard Williams how he thought things would play out having been an observer of this since the beginning and this is what he said.
00:45:56
Speaker
I think the point would be when we heard the news that our jobs were safe, thanks to the union's negotiations and our public campaigning, which I think did make a difference. The fact that those watching this who did write in, who signed the petition, it did make a difference. We won. And I think the VC conceded, at a number of points, our vice chancellor, did concede at least two occasions that she listened to the voices.
00:46:24
Speaker
And I think the voices you listen to included academic archaeologists that wrote in at our request, but also the CBA. So hats off to the, I think there was, you know, they made a difference. Now, what I would then say though, is that when I came out of the process, right, when I was free, I was looking at the middle of June, near the second note, so 18th, 19th of June, I was thinking, where's the debrief? Who wants to know what I did and what my colleagues did and what worked?
00:46:53
Speaker
And I talked directly to Sheffield, and I talked directly to Worcester, exchanged information, gave my view on what could happen, what they could do, might do, consider doing. But no one else from those organizations got in touch. I felt they'd done their duty, they'd written in.
00:47:10
Speaker
Now we can forget about Chester. We can forget about what they've gone through. There was no sense that they wanted a debrief from me or my experience of having someone who'd never campaigned properly in a serious way. I thrown in the deep end, did my little bit.
00:47:27
Speaker
And I thought, you know, where's the coordination coming? When, where's, where's the, are they going to talk to me? So jumping forward a little later, when I did get someone wanting to talk to me, I thought it was really going to be a two way exchange. They wanted to know.
00:47:42
Speaker
what worked, what didn't work, what we can do. And certainly, UA UK made very clear they weren't interested in hearing from me. And this is outside of nothing to do with the particular issues with Dig for Archaeology and the Save Rich Archaeology campaigns. There was no sense, there was an interest in learning what was going on at Chester.
00:48:04
Speaker
And none of my colleagues have said they've been approached by UA UK to find out what happened, what was our circumstances about? Just simple basic facts. So formally, UA UK had no dialogue with us about what happened at Chester and what we learned from the campaigning at Chester. So as far as I'm concerned, apart from the stuff I've put out privately on my blog and stuff, no one has asked, no one knows.
00:48:31
Speaker
I'm not a SIFA member. SIFA did write in our support, I'll confirm that point and I'm very grateful for their support for us at Chester. And I think they do have a valid point about the need to build up long term relationships, and they have that expertise.
00:48:50
Speaker
Where is this in terms of public grassroots campaigning? They're talking about behind-the-scenes advocacy and long-term influence. Maybe I'm just my own naivety of understanding campaigning, but what was happening in 2021 at a time of exceptional change was a profession that is largely fed by graduates from universities and a university sector under threat. And I think that all of these bodies have been really just
00:49:19
Speaker
asleep, asleep at their desks, they didn't and the very fact I would put back to SIFA is I'm not one of your members guys, I respect what you're doing, I know you've got a difficult job and you've got the expertise in this field and I haven't done any of this lobbying but I would put back is well why was I looking on social media 30 days or so into a campaign to save my own job seeing you dish out advice about how to best campaign and you hadn't even been in touch
00:49:45
Speaker
It does suggest that they didn't want to know about individual departments' plights because I think the narrative was anyone that's already a threat must be asking for it, must be already doomed.
00:49:57
Speaker
don't worry about us lads, we'll keep working behind the scenes for the long game to save the few that survive whatever's coming. And I'm afraid that's just not good enough. I'm afraid that's just absolutely not saying SIFA just on their own, I'm saying the sector I think had to have acted quicker and thought through at least some strategy
00:50:17
Speaker
Now, maybe Chris Whitwood's campaign wasn't the strategy. But what else is there? I haven't seen anything. No one's approached me. And I haven't been looking for an excuse to see something in its stead. And I haven't seen it yet. And we're eight months after the Chester news first broke of us having job cuts, then Sheffield, then Worcester. And I fear, sadly, next year we'll see more. And that's what we should be planning for.
00:50:44
Speaker
And where is it being planned? How I actually think it will play out is I think next year will be the telling. You know, it was just a crisis that we weathered, or is it just the beginning of more? And if we get to April next year and more vice chancellors make a decision that archaeology, whether because of political pressure or from individual financial issues, is not for their portfolio.
00:51:10
Speaker
Where is the planning to resist to counter that? Will it be another single letter sent out and then made into an infographic for Twitter? Or will there be more? And, you know, I'm not sure.
00:51:24
Speaker
I'm not sure it will be Chester next year because I think our Vice Chancellor, despite many things I disagree with, I think she listened and I thank those bodies for what they did for us. This is what I'm saying, I'm not saying they're without many benefits. They really helped us and that's the point. They did work to help us but I think if things go downhill next year,
00:51:47
Speaker
We may need more than what was happening this year. And I think we need to plan collectively for it. So again, I'm not sure I have a vision. But I think there are pressures within the wider sector that wants to see cuts would always like a nice week for that week from chaff moment to make themselves feel vindicated about their superiority of their
00:52:05
Speaker
courses and they're students. But I think a lot of people are going to be very worried and it will lose all confidence in these organisations if they haven't done more than say, I'm not happy to go on TV, I'm not happy to talk to the media, I'm not happy to write more than one letter, that'll do. We've done our bit. Thank you, good night. Oh, isn't it a shame?
00:52:29
Speaker
And I think that, you know, and I must say also as a qualifier, I don't feel personally that it's really CFA or the CBAs or a responsibility to sort out HE archaeology provision, but they should be there, you know, supporting UAUK who have on their website claimed to be representing us and pushing the sector forward. And really those bodies together need to be doing something
00:53:01
Speaker
And that's where I feel like that's all I can say. So as we bring this bumper special episode of watching brief to an end, just in time for Advent.
00:53:16
Speaker
But no chocolate with this one, I'm afraid. Just a bit of a shit show. I suppose what we've presented here is a question.
Leadership and Collaboration Issues
00:53:30
Speaker
And that question is about the relationship between academic archaeology, public facing archaeology, the leadership of archaeology and archaeologically related bodies in this country.
00:53:44
Speaker
and the extent to which archaeologists are able to
00:53:52
Speaker
to accept support and to actually accept help where and when it's offered and to look beyond the same answers for solutions. At the moment, for example, a fairly popular phrase in terms of debugging management structures is something called groupthink.
00:54:14
Speaker
where you go to the same people for answers and they give you more or less the same answers that you're expecting to get. And that means that you feel as though you're doing the right thing, but actually sometimes you can end up doing something which is, well, possibly ill-advised, I suppose, depending on the scenario. The question, I suppose, would be, what is archaeology up to?
00:54:39
Speaker
Can archaeology continue in the way that it has been going on this trajectory? And how can we, through conversation, through examining other sectors and through hopefully reaching out to other groups,
00:54:57
Speaker
improve the situation because I think, as you quite rightly put it, this has not been a happy story and this certainly was not a pleasant episode to observe unfolding quite so publicly as it did on social media over that weekend at the end of August. What's your final thoughts on this, Andy?
00:55:22
Speaker
got a couple of final thoughts which I'd like to leave our viewers with. One is a quote from Chris Whitwood of the campaign to say British archaeology. He told me that at the end of the attempts at dialogue with the CBA and the CBA claim that they've tried, you know, they're willing to reach out but he hasn't reached out to them. There was a meeting at the beginning of September which didn't go well and again the details are in the article.
00:55:53
Speaker
But again, Whitworth told me, quote, I was hoping that the CBA would acknowledge that departments don't close on a regular basis, but it became apparent there was no cooperation to be had, because there was no campaign.
00:56:08
Speaker
So there's an issue there as Whitwood perceives it of a lack of consistent and coherent campaigning on the part of the CBA and others. And we heard something similar from Professor Williams who talked about the fact that there was no follow-up.
00:56:28
Speaker
from any of the representative bodies. Once the Chester issue appeared to have been resolved, there was no, there was no debrief on how, how that success being brought, how that success being made to happen. And what, what facts, you know, how, what can, what can we learn from this? And how can we, there's no second. Yeah.
00:56:52
Speaker
absolutely, that can be applied elsewhere proactively, not wait for it to not wait for the avalanche to be almost on top of us, but how to actually, you know, set off the maroon to set off the avalanche in a controlled way so that we can at least try and deal with the situation, not as an emergency, shall we say.
00:57:14
Speaker
Can I ask you at this point, it just occurred to me, is what we're looking at here, is this partly born out of the fact that we rely on archaeologists who have other jobs, who have other ongoing family and business and
00:57:33
Speaker
professional interests to be dealing with to also take on the very important business of keeping an eye on for example the media keeping an eye on on on government keeping an eye on what's being said on social media and therefore actually having that sort of sustained campaign that builds and grows and and and build up a critical mass is actually quite difficult for our sector to sustain is that part of the problem here potentially.
00:58:00
Speaker
I think it is, and in fact, in an interview on the SIFA website, Rob Lennox of SIFA, their advocacy advisor, actually said as much. She said, we're a small organisation in a small sector and therefore we do not command the scale and influence of bodies like the National Trust
00:58:17
Speaker
with their up to, I think it's up to six million members now. And then he said, we are limited by resources and therefore cannot engage in some of the expensive methods that big businesses or industries can to obtain access. Now, yes, that's true to a degree. And you're absolutely right to point out the fact that there are big comms operations at CFA and at CBA and so on, although they do have people with responsibility for comms.
00:58:46
Speaker
but i think that is it it's shall we say on ambitious and i think it's particular when you get somebody with calm skills.
00:58:56
Speaker
like Whitwood, who comes forward and says, you know, I can help mobilise a campaign, particularly on the universities, because that's what he was interested in campaigning about. And it was an issue that certainly academic academics just wanted to campaign about, certainly the ones at Worcester and at Sheffield, who were feeling somewhat neglected by then by their representative bodies, particularly University of Archaeology UK.
00:59:21
Speaker
So there is an argument that by not wanting to let outsiders in,
00:59:28
Speaker
even outsiders with skills, it's a case of point gun at foot shoot. And given that we are dealing with organisations who have relatively modest comms provision, or indeed are being handled more or less on a voluntary basis in some cases, I think it's probably worth considering other campaigning portions of the world and of our social media space.
00:59:58
Speaker
when we consider the fact that, for example, Greenpeace doesn't spend its time worrying about Friends of the Earth. It doesn't try to undermine WWF. WWF is wrestling, isn't it? WWF, again, another related but different approach to similar issues. Yeah, it's important to bear that in mind. It is factor.
01:00:26
Speaker
but it's not in some ways actually, it means that maybe a little less attention should be focused on others within the same sector and more on what we can all be doing together perhaps. Absolutely, to take that analogy you just picked up, Greenpeace traditionally campaigned perhaps a little bit more aggressively, a little bit more in terms of demonstrations, climbing a climate change campaign, climbing the outside of Big Ben and for
01:00:54
Speaker
things like that. Whereas Friends of the Earth tend to use more traditional campaigns like research, lobbying, and so on. You know, these days, there are things like crowdfunding, particularly for major campaigns, or if you want to, you know, we want to crowdfund for a particular piece of research, for example, to discover a public opinion on so and so. That's perfectly possible, but they're not thinking about going down those kind of routes.
01:01:25
Speaker
possibly because it might not come up with the answers that they want. But either way, again, it's a personal opinion, but I think there's a certain lack of ambition, shall we say, in how effective the sector thinks it can be. But I think
01:01:47
Speaker
leaving aside lack of ambition, lack of confidence, call it what you will. And again, particularly after what's happened this year, the sector is, my sense is talking to people that the sector is feeling pretty demoralised, pretty vulnerable still, even though they've been one or two successes, like the restoration of the upper level fund, upper tier funding for universities and so on. And I think
01:02:10
Speaker
There are more fundamental issues which are pointed up in a couple of reports which I came across while I was researching this piece. One is called The Future of Archaeology in England and it was published by the Society of Antiquaries, so one of our most senior expert groups full of people who were also members of CFA and CPA.
01:02:31
Speaker
It was a piece of research that was published in November 2020 and they observed that while there was quotes, well-documented, wide public interest and engagement in the past across the UK,
01:02:45
Speaker
there is worrying evidence of a negative impact of the, quote, silo structure of the archaeology sector that does not prioritise research or encourage innovation and collaboration. I think that word collaboration is particularly significant there. And another piece of research, SIFA's five-year review of what it calls the Southport Project in 2017,
01:03:06
Speaker
also noted that across the archaeology sector collaboration is not the norm and the default position for the majority of archaeological projects initiated through the planning process is for research to be tightly scoped within predefined budgets. There remains a disconnect between the cost of archaeological work and the value of the research it might generate and that the value of that research feeds directly back into the academic archaeology because
01:03:33
Speaker
although developer-funded archaeologists do fantastic work recovering gigabytes of data, warehouses full of physical archive of archaeology, they don't do the synthesised research that academic archaeologists do. And for a long time people have argued that there is a disconnect between the two fields. Now, there are attempts to do that, but I think perhaps at the root of this,
01:04:02
Speaker
a question that has to be asked is, do we need a more fundamental review of how academic archaeologists and the developer-funded archaeologists work together? And are groups like
01:04:26
Speaker
Fame, Federation of Archaeological Managers and Employers, SIFA, Chartered Institute for Field Archaeologists, which is mostly people in the developer funded field. Are they concerned that if they went down that route, it would mean restructuring projects and in the worst case, making projects more expensive? And we certainly can't be paying archaeologists more.
01:04:54
Speaker
That is the other issue. You say that, and I think it's the thought, and we've touched on this in a recent edition of Watching Brief when we looked at paying conditions. There are suggestions, put it no more than that, in certain parts of the sector that
01:05:14
Speaker
We need to move away from the idea that a trench-faced archaeologist on a developer-funded building site or a large government infrastructure project needs to hold a degree. That you can have an archaeological technician grade.
01:05:35
Speaker
who is doing the grunt work. It happens in places like Belgium. I've worked in Belgium and there you have effectively archaeological technicians, laborers who do the heavy lifting.
Innovative Employment Models in Archaeology
01:05:45
Speaker
And the people with the degrees are sat on the side of the trench doing the paper recording and writing the reports. And obviously that has bearing, has a bearing on the status of archaeologists, the status of archaeology as a profession.
01:06:03
Speaker
and what kind of archaeologist universities are turning out. It's complicated. And this is really a story about how almost the sector has perhaps tripped up on the very first step climbing the stairs to try and deal with this.
01:06:29
Speaker
Well actually, I think you've ended on a far more positive note than perhaps you do in your written article. For a hint, I think you mentioned breweries at the end of your written article.
01:06:44
Speaker
No, I need to jump in there. I actually quoted somebody who, shall we say, one of the things we put up in the article is that the worst thing that the sector could face now would be cynicism regarding
01:07:08
Speaker
its representative bodies among the people who were part of it, among the people who presented to the public and so on. And that cynicism I represent by quote from an archaeologist who I spoke to in the course of research, who said, they're therefore as bad as each other. And this, for me, was another classic example of how, as a sector, we couldn't organise, shall I say, a celebration in the brewery.
01:07:36
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And so I think, yes, we moved a little bit further beyond that sort of sentiment in this Watching Brief episode. This has been a long one. It will be a long one. I make no apologies for that. There's been an awful lot to fit in, but hopefully this has been interesting and useful and hopefully in the context of the tone that we are presenting within this episode, but also previous episodes,
01:08:02
Speaker
where we make our stance and approach clear, it is clear that once again we are being critical friends here. We're not trying to undermine particular organisations and we're certainly not.
01:08:20
Speaker
seeking to create division for the sake of clicks for example that's not that's not the point of this it's it's systems analysis is observing something and thinking and asking rather sorry how could it be improved and looking maybe.
01:08:35
Speaker
Suggesting that we look elsewhere for for how other people do things, how do other people do things to avoid the source of the sort of flashpoint that we saw at the end of August unfolding before our slightly shocked eyes.
01:08:50
Speaker
Do continue the conversation below, guys, and obviously on Twitter and elsewhere. Please do keep it civil and hopefully keep it constructed. Keep it in a tone that is building and that is growing and learning. And with that in mind, thank you for your time today, Andy. I'm going to bring things to a close because it has been a long one. Until next time, guys, do take care. Bye-bye.
01:09:22
Speaker
This podcast episode has been produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network in collaboration with Archaeosoup Productions. Find out more podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.