WAC Knowledge, Value and the Celtic Tiger

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Knowledge,

value

and

the

Celtic

Tiger.

Brendon

Wilkins

Paper

presented

to

WAC

06,

Dublin,

2008.

Abstract

The

buoyant

Irish

economy

has

stimulated

an

unprecedented

boom

in

commercial

sector

archaeology.

The

scale

of

this

work

has

challenged

accepted

understanding

of

regional

archaeological

sequences

with

the

discovery

of

new

and

entirely

unexpected

archaeology.

A

strong

legal

framework

underpins

a

methodology

of

total

archaeology,

a

contrast

with

policy

in

the

UK

where

the

mitigation

of

construction

impact

is

controlled

through

planning

guidance,

and

a

problem

-

orientated

methodology

of

sample

excavation

is

practiced.

Increased

quantity

entails

increased

cost,

and

given

that

this

work

is

undertaken

in

the

public

interest

the

question

must

be

asked:

does

a

bigger

sample

automatically

lead

to

better

results?

This

paper

seeks

ways

to

realise

the

knowledge

potential

of

that

data,

a

quality

that’s

not

necessarily

a

factor

of

quantity.

Introduction

You know the scene in

Back

to

the

Future

, just after Marty McFly wakes up dazed toa new and improved 1985. Old Doc brown, fresh from his foray into 2015, skids theDe Lorean to a halt, jumps out frantically and grabs Marty and his high schoolsweetheart Jennifer. Piling them in the back of the time machine, he stuffs a fewpotato peelings and an old beer can in the ‘Mr Fusion Gigawat maker’, then revs upto 88 miles an hour. Realising that there’s not enough road left for the flux capacitorto work its magic, Marty screams at the windscreen, but Doc Brown fixes him withhis beady eye and shouts:“Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!”Well, I was talking recently to Dr Jonathan Foyle, Chief Executive of the WorldMonuments Fund, and that’s precisely what he said to me. OK, he didn’t use thoseexact words in that exact order. But he did talk about oil being in terminal decline.He talked about alternative forms of transport in terms of social benefit, that roadbuilding as a first choice solution would locks us into an outmoded transport infrastructure, popular in the developed world in the later half of the 20

th

century,but one that developed countries now needed to move away from.We were both speaking at a conference at the British Museum and I’d beenpresenting a paper on the existential poet Donald Rumsfeld’s contribution tolandscape archaeology. I was talking about how development‐led archaeology, andin particular the Irish road‐building programme, is a fantastic opportunity to findnot just our known knowns, or our known unknowns, but also the unknownunknowns we didn’t know we didn’t know. My point was that infrastructure

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archaeology is challenging our accepted understanding and fleshing out regionalsequences in Ireland in a way that was unthinkable 10 years ago. As much as Ipushed the point to Dr Foyle, he wouldn’t accept it, particularly in relation to theconstruction of the M3 in the Tara environs. In fact in an interview with theObserver a few weeks later, in response to Seamus Heaney’s criticism of modern dayIreland’s pursuit of the secular above the sacred, Dr Foyle went further, and said theconstruction of the M3 was equivalent to the state‐backed destruction of theBamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Strong words, but that one made me laugh – just the thought that Headland could all be a front, and I might actually be employed byTaliban Archaeology Services. TBAS.For those of us working at the ‘coal face’ of Irish archaeology these comments aredisheartening, but not unusual. Development‐led archaeology has come under firefrom both within and without the discipline in a way it never did when practiced asa purely academic activity. With regular headlines like this, many visitors to Irelandhere today could be forgiven for thinking that Irish archaeology is dominated byhigh profile controversies such as Tara, Carrickmines or Woodstown. I’ve always felt that the media storm is actually a sideshow, and the real story one of a seismic shift in our archaeological understanding. But perhaps the reason I don’t see eye to eyewith Dr Foyle is because while I’m justifying work in terms of its archaeologicalsignificance, he’s talking about archaeological value, about why we are choosing toexcavate in the first place. It’s a fair point. Can the significance of the archaeologicalmaterial – of this new resource ‐ be balanced against the social, political andeconomic arguments for development? More of this later.In this short contribution, I’d like to assess how these issues connect to work on theground, how these weighty arguments might be operationalised as strategies in thefield, reflecting on my own experience working at all levels in both Britain andIreland.

Two

Cultures

At the beginning of last year Richard Bradley presented an influential paper to ameeting of the Society of Antiquaries in London called

‘Bridging

the

Two

Cultures

–

Commercial

Archaeology

And

The

Study

of

Prehistoric

Britain’

.His premise was straightforward: in Britain and similarly in Ireland, there are twodifferent cultures of archaeology. On the one hand we have academic archaeology,committed to research and the pursuit of knowledge, and on the other hand we havecommercial archaeology, devoted to the ‘preservation by record’ of archaeologicalremains threatened with destruction. These two archaeologies are undertaken bydifferent people, paid for by different sponsors, and the results disseminated indifferent ways.

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He sees these differences as being rooted in rationalist and empiricist philosophicaltraditions, positions held firmly by archaeologists who now talk the language of ‘audit culture.’ It’s a good analysis, but he’s not the first to highlight the perceiveddifferences between ‘Rescue’ and ‘Research’ archaeology. In the 60’s Alfred Kidderonce remarked that there were two types of archaeologist: those with hairy backs,and those with hairy chins, and he wasn’t just talking about the women. With that inmind I’ve often wondered what side I’m on. The hairy chin side, or the hairybackside.In symmetry with Bradley’s recent paper outlining the problems associated withcommercial archaeology, both the

Royal

Irish

Academy

and

The

Heritage

Council

have recently published detailed analyses of commercial issues in relation to what has been called ‘Celtic Tiger’ archaeology. Starting in the 1980’s and particularlyfrom the later part of the 1990’s, we saw a massive growth in commercial sectorarchaeology fuelled by intensive infrastructural development. The growth can betacked in the rise of excavation licenses, as well as the amount of archaeologistsemployed in the commercial sector.The main problem in Ireland is seen to stem from a lack of cohesion and inter‐institutional collaboration between contracting archaeology companies undertakingfieldwork and university based archaeologists involved in research. A result of this‘disconnectivity’ is that development‐led archaeology is undertaken purely tofacilitate infrastructural projects and the vast amount of sites excavated remainunpublished. In response to this criticism from within and without the discipline,the new Minister for the Environment, Mr John Gormley TD, has recently announceda wide reaching review of the archaeological policy and practice in Ireland, andappointed an expert committee with international representation to steer thereview and development of new legislation.

Resource

management

and

knowledge

generation

While many disagree the finer points of how policy should be implemented, allwould agree that the reason we are undertaking this review is to achieve quality andbest practice according to internationally agreed standards. But the emphasis hasbeen on generating a quality product (such as publication) without consideringquality as process (or how this product might be realized by our excavationstrategies). This is an important distinction, because in commercial sectorarchaeology a quality archaeological product (generating new, secure knowledge of the past) is not necessarily the same thing as quality management of archaeology(managing a program of archaeological work within time and budget).The archaeology‐as‐service model rests on the assumption that the materialremains of the past are a ‘non‐renewable resource’. The consequence has been toorientate the commercial sector around the preservation of archaeological remains(either

in

situ

or by record). Interpretive decisions can then be delayed to a later