British Archaeology, no 7, September 1995: Comment

The CBA's Executive Committee was recently told of allegations that some contracting archaeological units are using unpaid (and possibly unskilled) volunteers, instead of trained archaeologists, to depress their costs and undercut other units.

It may be that these allegations are a misreading of early signs of change in archaeology's culture, away from fixed permanent teams and towards the importation of specialist skills from a fluid network of outworkers. But if the allegations are accurate, the use of untrained volunteers could be the harbinger of a price war which would bring a catastrophic drop in the quality of work.

Contracting units and local authority curators have worked hard to explain to developers (by no means all of whom are predisposed to listen) why it is important that they should wish to accept a proper archaeological service.

Worry arises now not because volunteers have no place in commercial archaeology - many are highly skilled, and their contributions are valued - but because the imperatives of commerce threaten to overwhelm those of archaeology. If responsible units are undercut because rival units are cutting corners, their choice will be between a reduction in the scope and quality of their work, or closure.

Asking questions, and a perpetual search for new enlightenment, provide the oxygen which is vital to the life of archaeology and to public engagement with its results. Such qualities cannot prosper in the absence of knowledge and experience, which in turn call for investment in people. Sweatshop competition will not make units leaner and fitter, merely weak and emaciated.

If this happens only the cowboy operators will flourish, and then but temporarily, until their clients revolt - and demand that the Government reverses a policy which obliges them to pay for archaeological work of a quality that (by then) even archaeologists would find hard to defend.

Measures to avoid these threats call for care, lest they themselves have damaging side effects. Demands for an archaeological closed shop, even the licensing of excavation, are already audible. If they gain in volume, precious time and energies which should be going into archaeology will be diverted into divisive argument and more regulatory bureaucracy.

In the short term, the way to approach the problem is not to exclude volunteers from commercial projects - which, as so many amateurs make clear, is what normally happens anyway - but to ensure that competition is fair. The value of volunteer contributions to professional operations should be explicit in contract tenders, and in certain circumstances clients should be charged accordingly. There is work here for the Institute of Field Archaeologists.

For their part, the volunteers who help on commercial projects might reflect whether their enthusiasm and skills are being put to best purpose. On some occasions this may be so, and no one should shrink from celebrating the fact that many amateurs practise archaeology primarily because they enjoy it.

However, the amateurs' greatest strengths - freedom of choice in what they do, and time within which to exercise it - lie in just those areas which the profession has largely vacated. If archaeology's voluntary sector began to display more intellectual ambition, thinking nationally while acting locally, and more personal enterprise in initiating projects, commercial archaeology and conservation would be placed in a richer context.

In the longer term, we should revisit deeper issues. These cluster round the basic question of what archaeology is actually for. The simple answer is that consciousness of time, and of ourselves as social beings, are among humanity's defining characteristics. A desire to understand and approach these characteristics through the prism of history (or one of its relatives, like myth), is thus implicit in what we are. Archaeology is an extension of that. Being so, it is no more optional than laughter, memory, or love, and requires no functionalist justification.

Down the years archaeology has become more disciplined and systematised in its practice. This will continue, and properly so. Systems, however, can easily become confused with the aims which they exist to serve. The apparatus of commercial competition and the conservation ethic are examples; and for some, they have become ends in themselves, rather than contingent upon what archaeology is.

The way to run cowboy contractors off the road is for archaeologists of all backgrounds to come together to restore archaeology's sense of identity and purpose as a humane discipline. The effects of such a declaration from, say, 400 local, regional, and national societies, and some thousands of individuals - that is to say, a fully attended General Meeting of the CBA - would be irresistable.

Richard Morris is the Director of the CBA