I'm certainly not offended!  I'm probably (a.k.a. certainly) to blame
for not being clear in my previous post: I envy the US, not as a country
so rich that it can afford to create sites for its students to dig,  but
as a country so rich that those students aren't digging on other,
underfunded sites.
 
Re-reading what I just wrote I see another question: would students
rather (or, if you prefer, is it better for students) dig on a created
site, where they will be told whether or not they spotted the change
between layer A and layer B, whether or not they correctly deduced the
sequence of events in layers C, D, E and F12, and gathered 99% of the
artefacts above 10mm cubed, etc, etc.  Or would they rather (or is it
better) that they should dig on a site which is real, where their work
will be of some value and/or where they will experience the 'real'.
 
Personally I see advantages to both (and both for those who wish to
learn, and for the latter for those who wish to preserve by record).  I
was trained on a real Roman site, now under a housing estate.  The fact
that the director had dozens of students meant he could get low(ish)
quality person-hours for nothing, and therefore he could do work which,
had he stuck to his paid-people-hours budget, wouldn't have got done.  I
think the training was good (the director therefore moved his 'low'
hours to 'fair' hours), but an 'excavate this and I'll tell you how you
did' site might have been, I think, superior _for me_.  For _the
director_, it might have been a loss.  On the other hand, maybe the loss
of a percentage of his staff-hours because some people didn't meet the
grade on a pre-course (on site, I seem to remember, they discovered a
talent for small-finds washing, or moving wheelbarrows full of earth) or
because they found the 'pseudo-site' took their annual leave for that
year, was balanced out by the increased value of the better-trained
people who first took trowel to his hypocaust.
 
--
Pat Reynolds
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Keeper of Social History, Buckinghamshire County Museum
   "It might look a bit messy now, but just you come back in 500 years time"
   (T. Prattchet)