Feature: British Archaeology 107, July/August 2009

Kenneth Aitchison reviews the continuing impact of the recession on the practice of archaeology.

Archaeology in the United Kingdom is a significant business. The vast majority of archaeological work here is commercial and funded by developers. In 2006, 93% of all archaeological investigations – whether assessments, evaluations, excavations or surveys – were initiated through the planning process. Since 1990, if a developer seeks planning consent for a project that might damage archaeological remains, then they have to show how much impact there will be and how this will be mitigated against. They pay archaeologists to do this work.

Developer funding has led to an unprecedented and unparalleled growth of the archaeological sector which has been powered by house building. Other forms of construction have played their part too, but new housing – whether on greenfield sites or previously developed brownfield land – has led to an enormous amount of archaeological work.

Two years ago the IfA (Institute for Archaeologists) collected data about who works in all areas of British archaeology, what they do, where they work, how they are rewarded and what skills they have and need. The report expanded and updated research undertaken five and 10 years before. That survey showed that 6,865 people were in paid employment as archaeologists in the UK in August 2007. The number had grown by about 4% every year over the previous decade, and more than half of the jobs were in commercial archaeology. The sector was booming, and archaeological companies expected to keep on growing.

The 2007-08 survey captured data in the very week that the phrase "credit crunch" entered our vocabularies. In August 2007, the story broke that banks were becoming reluctant to lend to each other, mortgages started to become harder to find and a downward spiral had begun. The Land Registry's index of house prices in England and Wales peaked in that month, and the average house price has fallen everymonth since.

This had an immediate effect on the house building industry, with a knockon effect on archaeology. At first, this was relatively gentle. But in September 2008 the economic crisis entered what has been called its "second phase", or "the global economic crisis", as stock markets crashed, US financial institutions went to the wall and Iceland's banks collapsed. UK construction essentially came to a halt and with that new sources of archaeological work dried up.

Archaeology's customers – the developers, and in particular house builders – were and are being hit hard and some are going bankrupt. This means that some archaeological projects are being stalled or even abandoned completely. If the developers run out of funds, then archaeologists will not get paid for work that they have contracts for – and cash flow problems are what send businesses to the wall. Without money coming in, commercial archaeological practices are at real risk.

Without work for their field teams, several major archaeological employers had to enter into redundancy negotiations, and rumour and gossip spread about which companies were in trouble and which might even be about to collapse. At the start of 2009, IfA (together with Fame, the Federation of Archaeological Managers and Employers) rapidly surveyed the significant employers in commercial archaeology. It emerged that an estimated 345 archaeological jobs had been lost between October and December. These represent one in 12 of the jobs in commercial archaeology and 5% of the entire UK archaeological workforce (see News and feature by Mike Heyworth, Mar/Apr 2009).

University of Manchester Archaeological Unit to close

The University of Manchester Archaeological Unit, directed by Mike Nevell, will close on July 31 with the withdrawal of university support. The Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit, also based at the university, is said not be affected. UMAU offered survey, excavation and publication services, focussing on Romanisation, buildings and industrialisation, with expertise in community archaeology and teaching. Its major schemes include the award-winning Tameside Archaeological Survey, the excavation of Mellor iron age hillfort and the Park Bridge Industrial Archaeology Project. In April its website listed 11 senior archaeologists, with a DPhil, two PhDs, an MPhil, an LLB, and one BSc and nine BAs. The closure leaves an uncertain future for some 20 community projects and is a significant loss for industrial archaeology. Other commercial university units include Archaeology South-East (UCL), ARCUS (Sheffield), Birmingham Archaeology, GUARD (Glasgow) and ULAS (Leicester).

Lindsey Archaeological Services, an independent practice founded in Lincoln in 1987 and directed by Naomi Field, has filed for insolvency. MP

Along with giving us the facts about job losses, archaeological employers told us how they saw the future. While most expected to stabilise the numbers working for their firm, they almost universally thought that the market would deteriorate further during 2009 – and the early signs are that this is the case. Most of them also recognise that some archaeological businesses will have to cease trading.

There are essentially two ways that commercial archaeological companies can go bust. They can quite literally shut down overnight when the money stops coming in but the bills still have to be paid. Alternatively, if they are part of a larger organisation – such as a local authority or a university, as many archaeological firms are – the parent organisation might decide that they are too much of a risk or burden and initiate a controlled closure.

In either case, archaeologists will lose their jobs. The luckier ones will have been in post long enough to be entitled to redundancy payments, but many archaeologists – particularly fieldworkers – will not have this (limited) financial support. The skills that these people have built up, in many cases over years of experience, could be lost to the profession.

Projects may grind to a halt; with no designated successor organisation to take over responsibilities, crucial information about life in the past may be lost. Furthermore, archives (the paper and digital records as well as physical material recovered by projects) that have not yet been lodged with designated repositories such as local museums will be at risk of being broken up or lost – "preservation by record" will have failed. If a company goes into receivership, all of that firm's assets will be distributed between its creditors – very few of whom will want the archaeologically important record sheets, soil samples or boxes of broken pottery.

In his November 2008 pre-budget report, the chancellor of the exchequer announced that the government would spend an additional £3bn on capital projects, primarily infrastructure but also new social housing. This will without doubt have a positive effect on archaeology, but spending like this is always slow to come on stream – and the figure, while substantial, is really just a splash in the bucket. The Construction Statistics Annual 2008 (Office for National Statistics), tells us that the total value of construction work in the UK in 2007 was £122bn.

Substantial projects – like the hotly-debated third runway at Heathrow, London Crossrail, or the Thames Gateway, where 160,000 houses are to be built over the next 20 years east of London – will involve considerable amounts of archaeological work, but they are all still a long way off. The pre-2012 Olympics work has been and gone – practically all of the fieldwork is complete, and those sites are in their post-excavation analysis stages.

One thing the government will do that might change the practice of archaeology is publish the replacement for PPG16, the guidance from 1990 that triggered the dynamic growth of commercial archaeology. The patiently-awaited planning policy statement 15: planning for the historic environment, will appear in draft form very soon. It is sincerely hoped that PPS15 will ensure that archaeological remains retain the level of controlled protection from development that PPG16 currently provides. It would be a disaster for the physical remains of the past – and for commercial archaeology in particular – if, in the interests of economic recovery, any government was to compromise the environmental protection offered by PPG16. But one is much more of a vote-winner than the other.

The IfA, as the professional association for archaeologists, has been lobbying hard to make sure that PPS15 says all the right things. We are also trying to contribute in whatever ways possible to the retention of skills within the sector. There will be no increase in the cost of membership subscriptions, reduced rates have been brought in to support members who lose their jobs, and advice is being provided to employers and employees on how best to manage the grievous situations that they find themselves in.

Times are tough, but commercial archaeology is resilient and is here to stay. It is the best and most flexible way to manage the demands of the economy on the historic environment. The sector has to look ahead; the upturn will eventually come, and archaeological work will return. Currently, skills are being lost in all areas and junior fieldworkers are being particularly hard hit. Companies are closing, some are merging and others fissuring as some archaeologists see a chance to do better in smaller organisations without the overheads that size brings. When we emerge from this crisis, archaeology will have changed – in shape, scale, and even in the kind of work that we do.

The IfA survey, Job Losses in Archaeology – April 2009, is now published. It reveals that nearly 200 more archaeologists found themselves out of work in the first quarter of this year, bringing the total jobs lost since the peak in summer 2007 to 670 – 16.5% of commercial posts and one in ten of all archaeologists.

Most losses are diggers and excavation directors. There are fewer losses in post-excavation work, but this area may rise as existing contracts are completed and the recession continues. The employers of 25% of staff do not expect to be able to maintain current levels – better than the January figure of two thirds, but still very high.

If an archaeological company fails, its archives belong to its creditors. Typically, archives have no intrinsic value and risk being thrown into a skip. Some artefacts, however, can have high sale value. These are unlikely to be the property of the archaeological organisation, but rather of the owner of the land where they were found, or a designated repository (such as a local museum) if the landowner has transferred ownership.

On April 28, Vanessa Collingridge interviewed University of Southampton archaeologist Yannis Hamilakis and Kenneth Aitchison for BBC Radio 4's Making History (Archaeology in crisis).

Hamilakis: "[We should] take the crisis as an opportunity to reflect on the structure of archaeology in this country. We should maintain the principle the polluter pays, but the idea of a developer tax or a levy that many archaeologists have been proposing for a number of years is a very interesting one, and we should give it consideration. Once you have an independent authority that manages that tax... [it] can attract money from other sources – state sources, charities, funding councils – and plan archaeological work on a research basis, not just on development."

Aitchison: "These ideas are very nice, but I'm afraid the developer tax idea is just, wrong. We do need to have that direct link between the developer and the damage they are causing. If it is shared amongst all developers, including those that deliberately choose not to damage archaeological sites by not building on top of them, then responsibility has been taken away from the polluter."

Hamilakis: "The problem is that once you have a direct relationship, then you are responsible as an archaeologist primarily to the client, to the developer, you are not responsible to the public"

The Times printed a letter on March 27 from Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (president, British Academy) and Geoffrey Wainwright (president, Society of Antiquaries of London), headed "Urgent action is needed to safeguard the UK's cultural heritage". "Unless steps are taken immediately", they wrote, "the specialised skills [in the practices that supply rescue archaeology services to developers]... could be lost, which would be disastrous in itself, and will in turn delay eventual recovery in the construction sector. The ecurity of excavation archives – documents, computer-held data and objects – in the care and possession of these practices is also at serious risk."

Comments on the Times website included:

"These practices take (have taken) full advantage of the times of glut in development, and should have prepared for the bad times, much like property developers have to do. Exactly the same argument can be applied to other contracted professionals." S Booth, Derbyshire

"There are considerable differences between archaeologists and other professions, such as architects, not least the level of reward; if I left archaeology to drive a bin wagon, I would soon get used to the higher standard of living and better working conditions, and would find it hard to return." Geoff Carter, Hexham

"Archaeologists tend to have strong ethical values, which leds [sic] to them be forked over by property developers and their ilk." Kayt Bell, Cowes

British

Archaeology

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Issue 107

July / August 2009

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CBA Correspondent

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Archaeology is changing – forever

University of Manchester Archaeological Unit to close

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