Issue 63

February 2002

Contents

news

Glastonbury lake village and prehistoric tracks ‘drying out’

Rare Bronze Age metal working site found on Eigg

Log boat from Tay estuary dated to the later Bronze Age

Archaeologists uncover history of the Royal Arsenal

Hidden collection of cross slabs at Co Durham church

In Brief

features

Commanders and Kings
Tony Wilmott on how post-Roman kingdoms were formed

People of the Sea
Barry Cunliffe on the lure of the sea from earliest prehistory

Great sites
Julien Parsons on 19th century excavations at Belas Knap

letters

On defleshing, ancient roofs, plague and conservation

issues

David Baker on regulation of developer-funded archaeology

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

London Under Ground edited by Ian Haynes, Harvey Sheldon and Lesley Hannigan

Northumberland: the Power of Place by Stan Beckensall

Archaeology and the Social History of Ships by Richard Gould

Prehistoric and Roman Essex by James Kemble

Landscape Detective by Richard Muir

A Fortified Frontier by Iain MacIvor

CBA update

favourite finds

Memories of Callanish. Aubrey Burl had a ‘eureka’ moment in pondering Callanish.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

issues

Gaining more value from archaeology

We need a new kind of regulation for developer-funded archaeology, argues David Baker

Among the proposals in the Government's recent green paper on reforming the planning system, published in December, is one to simplify the numerous 'planning policy guidance' notes (PPGs) - documents issued by central Government to advise planning authorities on national policy.

This is important, because the vast majority of the archaeology carried out in Britain today is done under ppg16 and its equivalent nppg5 in Scotland, which cover how archaeology should be handled in the planning system. So it is clearly time to look again at how successful ppg16 has been during the last eleven years since it was introduced.

The sad truth is that while PPG16 has led to a huge quantity of work on countless important archaeological sites, its results - the information and knowledge generated about Britain's past - is not feeding back into the wider academic and popular consciousness anything like as well as it should be.

The first thing to make clear is that this is not in itself the fault of ppg16. This policy document was never intended to devise strategies for academic research, or to disseminate the results of investigation beyond archiving and technical reports. Its purpose is limited to the tactics of environmental land-use management - how to protect archaeological sites from destruction by development, and, if excavation becomes necessary, who should pay for it.

Publishing results

However, the success of ppg16 in this role has been compromised by poor coordination with research and communication. The research strategies that should guide ppg16's use are spreading too slowly across the land. The communication of results is even weaker, with nuggets of local information accumulating silently and largely unsynthesised in local Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs).

Local authority archaeologists - the 'curators' of the ppg16 system - are charged with ensuring adequate research input into project designs, and the communication of results. But most are too hard-pressed by the relentless demands of planning casework to be free to plan for these other issues.

Most SMRs have not developed beyond planning tools into the comprehensive, definitive and accessible local records that were originally envisaged. Most have no capacity to present inevitably technical holdings in ways that can benefit owners, teachers, local communities, tourists and the interested general public.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has provided grants to a few authorities to make their SMRs more accessible. But this crucial outreach work has been justified on the grounds that it is 'additional' to what local authorities can be expected to do themselves. This is surely tackling the issue the wrong way round. If this kind of public service work is not a 'core function' of democratic local authorities, adequately resourced from public funds to provide it, then I cannot think what is.

Another problem relates to the quality of archaeology carried out under PPG16. The contracting units that pitch for PPG16-generated work might have been expected to compete on quality of research design rather than solely on price - but real life doesn't work like that.

Developers make procurement decisions that minimise costs, and archaeologists have to get work to make a living. Result: too many jobs are done on the cheap with inadequate regard for the advancement of knowledge - a complaint often heard from the relatively small number of academics who do use SMRs.

The truth is that a different kind of regulation is needed in order to achieve a stable working relationship between 'knowledge' and 'profit' motives. Research and communication depend on continuity and stability in the relationships between fieldworkers, archivists and communicators. Doubters have only to look at places where cost-cutting local authorities have privatised local units. There, the market has proved unable to provide an accumulating local story for local people.

Fear of losing the gains of PPG16 - namely the £30m and more generated annually for development-related archaeology - has made it politically incorrect to point out such deficiencies. But the truth will out. It must.

Invest to improve

The admirable Government agenda for cultural access and social inclusion is curiously blinkered in its failure to realise that access to the historic environment requires an adequately resourced infrastructure. Impressive levels of resources are now being pumped into libraries, museums and archives; but at the same time funding decreases for English Heritage and for local authority conservation services.

A review of PPG16 alone will not be enough. Instead, we need to make sure that structures and funding exist to provide the research and community benefits for which PPG16 was invented in the first place.

David Baker is a historic environment consultant and was formerly Conservation and Archaeology Officer in Bedfordshire

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