The conclusion of an interesting piece in Nature about the flood of archaeological data found by commercial excavators which never seems to get ‘published’ in the academic sense of the word … fyi:
Michael Fulford, one of Bradley’s colleagues at the University of Reading, has been piloting a study of the grey literature about Roman Britain, with similarly exciting results. “We’ve almost found ‘another Roman Britain’,” he says, “one that we would have never seen without developer-funded archaeology.”
Previously British Roman archaeology had tended to be biased towards excavating high-status sites such as villas, as these were what researchers had chosen to investigate. But commercial excavations happen wherever developers are planning to break ground, and so provide a wider sampling of the past.
By embarking on a “massive photocopying campaign”, Fulford assimilated huge amounts of data, representing a massive increase in both the number and type of sites now known. His study revealed the other side of Roman society. The low-status rural settlements showed how indigenous communities coexisted with Roman invaders, by keeping much of their vernacular architecture, but furnishing their homes with Roman manufactured goods. “A lot of the best work is coming out of commercial units now — a lot of the worst is as well, but you can say that about universities, quite frankly,” says Fulford.
He advises PhD students who want to keep their hand in fieldwork that they might be better off working in commercial archaeology because it often involves large projects that are properly funded. “A lot of my contemporaries feel disenfranchised, but then that’s too bad,” says Fulford. “Despite the difficulties, we have to adapt to an archaeological record that is massively expanded and, at its best, of far better quality than has been achieved by academics, who are often very part-time fieldworkers.”
via Archaeology: Hidden treasure | Nature News.
I wonder if similar conditions prevail in other nations within our purview …
rogueclassicism 