commercial archaeology | Allen Archaeology

According to a helpful little counter that shows up on my employment record I have been working for Allen Archaeology for 2 years 6 month and 23 days. Nothing particularly ground breaking, but in that period of time I been fortunate enough to work on some incredibly interesting and exciting sites but I’ve also progressed from a Trainee Project Archaeologist to Project Supervisor level and in the process received a staggering amount of training and learned what it means to be a commercial archaeologist along the way.

Taking part in a field school at Nevern Castle while at uni

I have always loved history, but it wasn’t until I started looking at University courses that I realised that when I grew up (!) I actually wanted to be an archaeologist! So in 2010 I went to study Anthropology and Archaeology at Durham University, partly because it was something that I thought would be interesting and partly because they let me live in the castle. It was pretty good in that it gave a very comprehensive overview of archaeology, but like most archaeology degrees lacked in practical aspects; in fact there were no compulsory archaeological fieldwork modules as part of the course. Nonetheless, I left Durham with 8 weeks of field experience, and the overwhelming impression that commercial archaeology may not be something I really wanted to look into; it was a bit too cynical and our yearly “careers” talk made it seem like the commercial world was not an exciting one to work in. So when my degree ended I made the decision to take a year off, earn some money, and then go back and do a masters.

This plan however spectacularly failed. I moved back to Lincolnshire and got a call from AAL (a year after I had applied to be a volunteer with them!) asking if I was available to work and offering to employ me. I started in September 2013 as one of their trainee site assistants, with very little experience of what commercial archaeology was or what was expected of me.

I did have a trowel though; so it was a start.

Where I cut my teeth was at AAL’s colossal North Killingholme project (NKAM) and training was given on the job. I was told what I was expected to do and then left to get on with it; sort of like being thrown in at the deep end and “shadowing” the other project archaeologists when I needed guidance. There was no formal training plan but I think it was a pretty effective way of learning the basics, and there was always someone nearby to help when I got lost.

It was fairly simple archaeology to begin with, putting metre sections through Roman ditches, and the thing I remember most is continuously being squeaked at and asked by the PO on site “Are you happy with those edges?”. It turned into a bit of a game with all the other PA’s on site, lightly mocking this phrase, but it taught me how to excavate quickly and accurately and helped me progress into being a real Project Archaeologist. Learning how to record took me a little longer however, it was a whole new experience being shown how to draw to scale and how to trust my interpretations of features, but I got there eventually and was able to move onto digging larger and more exciting features, like ditch intersections, Roman Kilns, and ring ditches.

Excavating a skeleton in October 2014

That’s one of the things I enjoy about working here, that there is a lot of effort devoted to trying to training staff and to give everyone a rounded knowledge base; everyone learns how to work the survey equipment and is expected to be able to excavate and record a feature from start to finish, and everyone gets some experience in post-ex be it finds processing, writing context summaries, or producing figures. It’s something that I massively benefited from.

The next year was a massive learning curve and I received a lot of training beyond the practical skills I was still learning in the field. I got to handle a lot of the material remains that were coming from sites through washing and processing the finds and I started learning the basics of post-excavation work and about working with GIS programs by digitizing drawings and phasing sites. I spent a lot of time staring in frustration at muddy scans while digitizing plans and sections and at the array of pastel colours used to phase the NKAM sites, . It wasn’t always the most exciting things, but it defiantly helped me become a more rounded archaeologist, and made me realise the importance of properly recording and checking the work we do on site!

DIgging the ring ditch at North Killingholme

At the end of June 2015 positions became available within the company for Project Supervisors and, with the support of my line manager, I applied and was given the job as a trainee supervisor. Unlike my last traineeship, this position had a much more structured training plan and I was given tasks which needed to be signed off by various managers and project officers in order to check my progress. It was a little messy at first as there was still a massive hands on approach, and it took some time to actually be able to put the training plan in place for various reasons, but I started off in a safe place, back at Killingholme guiding our new trainees, before being sent off on some of my own jobs. Like before I started off small; with small scale watching briefs and evaluation sites which over the next few months gradually progressed into slightly larger jobs, with a few other team members to supervise. It took some adjusting to (and a lot of site visits and phone calls asking questions before I got my bearings!), but it was exciting and I got to work on some interesting sites and developed a particular interest in community based archaeology. I had enjoyed working on some of the previous outreach projects such as the open days at North Killingholme and at the Canwick Bomber Command Memorial site in 2014, so when I was given the opportunity to work on a few community projects run with the National Trust I jumped at the chance!

Talking to volunteers on a community dig at Hinton Ampner

What changed most with this new role, however, was the responsibilities beyond the fieldwork and learning how to manage a site, and I got the chance to develop more post excavation skills. I learned how to structure reports and produce figures and I spent a lot of time in the office repeating this process until it was second nature. Again it’s not always the most exciting thing, and some days it’s incredibly frustrating and I wish I was outside happily digging ditches, but it is worth it. There is a special sort of pleasure you can take in making a figure look pretty, or getting your teeth stuck into a particularly interesting site you are writing up!

I suppose what I take from all this reminiscing about the considerable range of traineeships and professional development I have experienced within Allen Archaeology over the past two and a half years, is that I’m incredibly proud of my achievements here and, despite a number of stumbles along the way, I am very grateful for the continuous support and guidance I have received at all stages, from everyone within the company. It’s made me the archaeologist I am today and I love my job, especially the community projects and the opportunities to be involved in new team members training, and I hope I give them even a little but as much encouragement and support as I received when I first started.

But I’m still learning.

And I may have realised that now I’m not always joking when I ask people on a site I am supervising if they’re happy with their edges….

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.

Roman colonnade discovered in Lincoln in 1878

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.

General Augustus Pitt-Rivers 1827-1900

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!!

Hoeing snow at Sleaford Power Station

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.

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