The discipline of archaeology is as old, or older than some of the finds we dig up every day, with the first documented archaeological dig dating to the 6th century BC when the Babylonian king Nabonidus led excavations to find the earliest phases of several palaces and temples in ancient Babylon.

In recent history, the discipline of archaeology began as a gentlemanly pursuit, with the profession gradually developing an increasingly scientific approach thanks to a number of scholars in Europe and America during the 19th century, such as General Pitt Rivers; a British soldier and adventurer, who brought military precision and organisation to the process of archaeology. Nevertheless many archaeological discoveries were still chance finds during development. In the 20th century, another military man, Mortimer Wheeler, also employed military precision in his numerous excavations in Britain and India, and helped bring archaeology to a mass audience through numerous TV and radio appearances.

As the pace of development increased in the post-war years, the relationship between archaeology and development changed. It became apparent that many important archaeological sites were being lost, with little or no record. This led to the evolution of a whole new discipline of ‘rescue archaeology’ or ‘salvage archaeology’, which introduced new techniques to maximise the recovery of archaeological data with the limited time and resources available. This led to the development of a number of archaeological organisations, often based within and partially funded by local authorities, as well as by developers, to undertake these rescue digs.

Legislation was slow to catch up however, and it was not until, in 1990, with the implementation of PPG 16, the ‘polluter pays’ principle was applied to archaeology and development. This piece of planning guidance placed a burden upon the developer to ensure that archaeological remains at threat from development were adequately recorded, with that funding coming directly from the developer, and the work more often than not being secured by planning conditions. In some local authorities there was a feeling that more work should be undertaken pre-determination, both to limit future delays to construction programmes, and due to the concern that should important remains be exposed, there was little chance to offer them legal protection or record them adequately once a grant of planning permission had been issued. This finally manifested itself with the release of PPS5 in 2010, which placed greater emphasis on providing more information on a sites archaeological potential prior to submission of a planning application. PPS5 was short lived, but much of the guidance in PPS5 was adopted into the new National Planning Policy Framework in 2012.

The provision of developer funding for archaeology resulted in the development of numerous independent archaeological companies, and in recent years, the local authority based units have largely died out. Most companies nowadays are small, with tens of employees rather than hundreds, as well as numerous sole traders, particularly in the fields of specialist finds analysis. The fact that archaeology is developer funded also means that it is subject to competitive tendering to win projects, with the best price to fulfil the councils brief for the works usually being the winner. As such the whole process is very different to the preconceived notion of a cohort of academics and university students spending season after season studying every aspect of a single site in painstaking and minute detail. Furthermore, we can no longer choose where to go and what to dig up, rather, we are driven by the needs of our clients, so one week we may be excavating an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Norfolk, then the next week Victorian tenements in Sunderland. Unfortunately, this also means we cannot, like academic research digs, restrict our digging to a few months in the summer, but have to be outdoors all year round, so a decent set of waterproofs and some woolly socks are a must!!

Because of the restrictions imposed by the nature of the industry, commercial archaeology can often seem a brutal process, with a lot of the heavy work undertaken by mechanical excavators, or a ‘big yellow trowel’ as they are colloquially known. That’s not to say there is not a lot of manual work after that. As soon as the topsoil is stripped off a site, its down to the mattocks, spades and shovels, and yes the trowels do still make an appearance as well. An experienced archaeologist can move a remarkable amount of soil with a trowel, and they have also been known to come in handy for cutting birthday cake in an emergency!!

In the 21st century, development led archaeology represents by far the majority of archaeological work undertaken in the UK, and the fact that this archaeological work is driven by the location of new developments, rather than a research focussed programme intended to test or prove a certain theory, has resulted in a new understanding of the country’s history and heritage, often leading to reappraisal and revision of traditional theories. The vast majority of the output of commercial archaeology is in the form of reports required by the planning authority, ‘grey literature’ as it is known, with only a minority of key sites reaching formal publication. However, numerous attempts have been made by academic researchers and commercial archaeologists alike in recent years to collate and interpret this ever growing body of data to further the understanding of the finite archaeological resource that lies beneath our feet.