Tag Archives: infrastructure

Weekly Round-up

Following on from yesterday’s ‘Ask and Archaeologist’ day we thought we’d do a little office round up to give you an insight into what our staff have been working on this week!

Our Finds and Archive Department have been busy this week preparing finds for archive deposition and preparing material to go off to the relevant specialists. We have also had a number of volunteers come to work with us from the University of Lincoln over the past month and this week we welcomed Roksana and Louise who have been washing various finds from some of our recent sites and marking the pottery ready for archive deposition.

Roksana and Louise marking some pottery from a recent site

The head of our geophysics team, Rob, has been doing some digitisation for a large linear infrastructure site in Lincolnshire as well as doing a watching brief in a small village just outside Lincoln. Mia, one of our Project Supervisors, has been busy working on some building recording reports for a range of sites in Lancashire and Cambridgeshire.

Rob of our Geophysics team looking very studious!

The Heritage Research Team (affectionately known as Heritage HQ) have been working on a variety of desk-based assessments for sites in Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, and Lancashire. Heritage team member Harvey has been out visiting sites in Cambridgeshire and Nottinghamshire and has discovered some interesting cropmarks just outside of the Cambridgeshire Archives at Shire Hall which relate to the site of the old county prison. He thought it might have been a Roman building associated with a known Roman settlement to the north. Better luck with your interpretation next time Harvey, it happens to the best of us! Thanks to the effect of the hot weather on the ground, a lot of cropmarks have now become clearly visible across the UK.

Possible cropmarks visible outside of the Cambridgeshire Archives

And of course, our field teams have been busy across the country! With sites in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire (amongst others!) our field archaeologists have been working hard to excavate and record an array of archaeological features. We’ve also had some great finds from our sites this week, including some complete Roman vessels from a site in Lincolnshire!

Our field team having fun on site in Leicestershire

So it has been a busy week for us all here at Allen Archaeology and with the food festival coming to Lincoln this weekend I’m sure a few of our staff will be visiting!

Carillion collapse: lessons to be learnt for archaeology?

By Mark Allen, Director

The 15^th January 2018 was a momentous and shocking (though not surprising) day with the announcement that Carillion, the second largest construction company in the UK had gone into liquidation. The signs had been there, with three previous profit warnings over 2017, the share price plummeting, and indeed the markets even betting against their survival since 2013! This has of course led to questions over why public sector contracts continued to be awarded to the company throughout 2017, but that is for others to discuss…

Now I am not, of course, saying our company was in any way comparable with Carillion at the time they ceased to exist: they had 43,000 staff worldwide, literally a thousand times the number of staff at Allen Archaeology! However, commercial archaeology is intrinsically linked to the construction sector; indeed its format of tendering for work is based on that of the construction industry. In addition, many archaeological contractors are likely to have been subcontractors on Carillion schemes across the UK, and, unless their financial contract was with a third party (e.g. the public sector), then they are almost certainly going to receive no reimbursement for invoices submitted or work yet to be invoiced for. There will not only be a financial impact but also a loss to archaeology as projects are shut down part way through, potentially leaving significant volumes of new data that will not be assessed or analysed or published, making it practically meaningless.

It has been written that Carillion continued with the ‘recession mind-set’ that prevailed after the financial crash of 2008, when the construction industry, and indeed archaeology, were hit particularly hard. Although many companies have moved forward over the last decade, not all have done so, and Carillion’s continual pursuit of this strategy resulted in serious ‘suicidal’ pricing shortfalls to keep the order book growing, the staff working and supply chains intact, whatever the cost. They piled on too much debt, chasing new business to make up for the shortfalls of cash caused by losses from the high risks that they continued to take.

Carillion sites across the country shut down immediately on the 15^th January, and their once competitors have been quoted as saying they would only take on many of the contracts with a 20% uplift in price, such was the artificially low price that Carillion had offered to undertake the work.

So why was Carillion given so much work, when many insiders in the industry were particularly concerned with their practices? Simply put, money. Large public sector (and indeed many of the larger private sector) schemes usually require at least a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) to be prepared by the tenderer. A large portion of the PQQ is focussed on showing the company’s suitability and experience for undertaking the work but usually anything from 40-60% of the tender package is focused on the bottom line, i.e. the overall price the company is willing to do the work for. There has been further criticism that many of those in the public sector reviewing PQQs do not have sufficient training or experience to do this, so the bottom line cost has carried some weight with the rest of the PQQ. After all, the lower the construction budget the higher the chance the overall project will be completed, as the construction element is almost without question the largest portion of the project finances.

The high risk approach of slashing potential profit to the bone or accepting a ‘loss leader’ in the hope of further work, or even a loss just to keep staff busy, simply must stop if there is going to be a healthy construction industry moving forward.

Now to here I realise I have focussed solely on the construction sector; however all of the above relates to the commercial archaeology sector too, albeit the financial values are somewhat lower.

Far too many times in the past when a contract has been awarded to a competitor, and the client has provided the range of (anonymous) quotations for the work, it has been shocking to see how low the winning bid has been, often significantly lower than all other quotations. You may think that this is sour grapes, but far from it. We are never going to win every contract, but the alarm bells should ring when three tenders are almost identical and one is, for example, half the price. This means that the winning contractor has decided to take on a lot more risk than any of their competitors, i.e. that they hope that significantly less archaeology will be encountered than the other tenderers have predicted. This is not because they know anything different, all known information on the archaeology is provided in the tender package and the answers to any queries during the tender stage are made available to all interested companies. They may be lucky, but it is more likely that they will not be, so they either make a loss, push for compensation events to recover additional money from the client (resulting in an unhappy client), or the archaeology suffers.

Whatever the case, the practice perpetuates the race to the bottom mentality, as competitive tendering forces companies to try to match or beat their rivals. This also sustains the continuous concerns over the levels of wages within the industry, as wages can only be set at levels that the company can afford.

We are living in a time where there is serious investment in public infrastructure projects such as HS2 and the Thames Tideway Tunnel, as well as a good level of private sector work, so it should be seen as an opportunity for the industry to stay busy with a fair price for work of high standard, to be treated with respect by the construction industry and not just viewed as a hindrance, and most importantly to use this opportunity to improve our standing in the sector allowing us to provide more archaeologists jobs, job security and higher wages, in line with their qualifications and experiences.

Archaeology in the commercial world

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.