Participating in the Past: Publicity and Communication Difficulties
3.4 Publicity and communication difficulties
Even in an age priding itself on providing information, mismatches between provider and potential recipient will always occur. Sometimes these failures are budgetary, sometimes they arise from poor communication skills. Occasionally putting information into the public domain may be considered undesirable by the ‘owner’ of the information, for example because of commercial sensitivity or fear of trespass or theft.
Few archaeological organisations escaped criticism by one respondent or another. Local societies were seen to lack marketing and publicity skills (likewise the CBA), museums to be too remote, local authority planning archaeologists to be too preoccupied with planning matters to communicate, and the general archaeological community poor at providing publicity for projects and events and not good at selling the discipline of archaeology as a whole to the public. By far the greatest amount of criticism, however, was aimed at commercial archaeological units.
The role commercial units play in respect of direct ‘hands-on’ public participation in excavation will be considered in a section below. Some general comments on their communication with the public over archaeological matters are noted here.
A common complaint was that there was no access, or infrequent, access to local ‘commercial’ excavations whilst they were in progress. It was deeply resented that client confidentiality clauses and other restrictions could commonly block access to, and on occasion even viewing of, excavations , and sometimes to the results of that work for several years. It was suggested that such conditions made a mockery of the idea that the ‘past belongs to everyone’. There was a suspicion that competitive tendering for archaeological contracts had made commercial archaeological organisations cut corners and steer clear of public participation which might make their jobs more difficult, unless a developer happened to be personally enthusiastic about the idea.
It was suggested that local planning archaeologists were not taking this on board as an issue. The results of archaeological fieldwork were often seen as difficult to access – a grey literature report in an SMR some months/years after the event, seemed a poor result. Archaeological records of fieldwork were noted to be often inaccessible to non-professionals. There was also a suspicion that commercial units often did not communicate well between themselves.
Although there were plenty of positive instances cited in the general area of communication, it was suggested that the communication skills of archaeologists – not just as individuals but organisationally – were sometimes far from adequate for the task in hand. This was felt to apply not only to commercially-based activities, but local groups. There was a general perception that it was ‘difficult to find out what was going on’.
