It saddens me as a professional to see minimalist presence or absence archeology dominating the field- in the future it will be viewed as only minimally better than pot hunting- availability of funding has not brought more science but less-I can't count the number of crm style report presentations which were totally devoid of anthropology.  It is all just look what we found. And as pointed out here crew pay does not qualify as real employment-at this point reset calls for less money rather than more-there is no way money can ever be found to do adequate work-archeology needs to be a public life way -not just a profession-we have not made the same progress as the ecological movement -largely due to professional snobbery-I have already posted out the waste of funds by professionals-a significant problem exists with the exploitation of volunteers for profit taking-the entire field needs rebuilding-

Conrad Bladey

Thank you in advance for your prompt response!


On Sep 15, 2013, at 7:58 AM, Jim <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

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> For what it is worth, I have occasional recourse to a quip when my clients try pressuring me: archaeology is like dentistry; rushing it could prove painful.
> That said, I've found most of the postings on this subject to be client-focused. It's a little like writing about generals and generalship without regard for the people who actually fight the battles.
> Is it possible that a well-paid crew, loyal to employers they know put their health, welfare, and future first, perform better and help produce products that are good, fast, and cheap? Certainly that has been my experience, but I dare not extrapolate from a sample of one, and an admittedly biased sample at that.
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> James G. Gibb
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> Gibb Archaeological Consulting
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> 2554 Carrollton Road
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> Annapolis, Maryland USA ?? 21403
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> 443.482.9593 (Land) 410.693.3847 (Cell)
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> www.gibbarchaeology.net ? www.porttobacco.blogspot.com
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> On 09/14/13, Boyer, Jeffrey, DCA<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Many years ago, a colleague and friend taught me the basic equation of contracting: "Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two."
> This holds whether one is getting a house built or a site dug in front of the bulldozers. I have to say, with sincere apologies to Chico Escuela, "Archaeology been berry berry good to me," but "berry berry good" has not always included a salary equivalent in value (in my mind) to knowledge and experience. I know very few archaeologists who are not or have not been willing to start at the bottom and work up but we all know we'd like to get paid up as we work up.
> What most of us run into over and over and over with private and public sector clients is their apparent desire to get all three and, if not, to get cheap and fast. Looking at it from the client side, as that same colleague and friend showed me, what they need and, therefore, want from us is a document or set of documents confirming that their planning and development process met the relevant, necessary legal requirements. As all CRMers know, or better figure out, our branch of archaeology-as-a-profession is a branch created by laws and regulations, without which client-driven archaeology would not be full of grads and post-grads looking for work. An industry created and maintained by laws and regulations has the feeling of being pretty wobbly and justifiably so given the see-saw fluctuations in public political will. We work, those of us on the client-driven side of archaeology, in an industry required by law and regulation and for our clients the ultimate product are those 
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> legal documents that allow them to proceed with whatever they have planned. In that environment, is it any wonder that the primary requirements for selecting some of us over others of us are cheap and fast? Good is great until it impacts cheap and fast in ways that lead to more expensive and slower.
> My son, a born entrepreneur if ever there was one, contends that contractors -- he is one, in an entirely different profession, one that I would think would wax and wane a lot with financial vicissitudes but which actually keeps him not only very busy but doing quite well at it -- must set for themselves and for their clients the difference between cost and value. Admittedly, in his profession, good is the primary goal of most clients but cheap and fast are highly desirable. His challenge, then, is to help his clients see that good is not a matter of cheap or fast or a matter separate from cheap and fast, but a matter of value, that there is considerably more value in the expertise and, therefore, the product of someone who is good, and that value is sacrificed when buried beneath cheap and fast. As he tells me frequently (paraphrasing), "Almost anyone can do what I do. Hardly anyone can do it the way I do it. That's my value in the situation. Are potential clients concerned 
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> with the value of my experience and expertise? If so, then they become clients. If not, then they don't. I'm not interested in having clients who aren't interested in the value of my experience and expertise and can't or won't see that value reflected in how good my work is." His mother and I have been very concerned about what appears to be an elitist business model -- "Can you afford to turn down clients?" we have often asked in fear for the security of his business -- but, we have to admit, it works well for him.
> The other side of that model is epitomized by those situations, with which we are all familiar, in which contractors underbid all competition and either 1) produce results that are not good, to their own detriment and that of the rest of us, and end up blackballed (and hopefully go out of business or change their ways) because their work is so shoddy, or 2) go out of business trying to do good, cheap, and fast all at once and ending up taking financially impossible losses on contract fees.
> Since one can only select two of the three aspects of contracting, and since, with precious few exceptions, pretty much all of us want to do good work, work that contributes to understanding the human past as well as work that provides our clients with their necessary legal documentation, I suspect that my son is right and we must, ourselves, identify value in our experience, our expertise, and our capability, helping our clients understand that value -- contrary to discount-store advertising -- is not found exclusively in cheap and fast, that they get value when we are allowed to work with them to identify what is good and find appropriate, relevant ways to balance that with cost and speed. After all, who knows more about what is good work than the people who do good work? The client might well identify the scope of work but we can and should identify the value of work: we know what it takes, how long it takes, and how much it should cost to generate a consistently good prod
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> uct and that is our value. If we don't, then it's time to find another profession.
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