When I signed up to Day of Archaeology I thought I would be out
on site, I didn’t know where–originally it looked like a big site in London,
but that has been delayed, and then it seemed I’d be up the road on a site I
evaluated a couple of years ago. As the recent heat wave began I became a bit apprehensive
at the idea of digging 3m wide rubble-filled ditches in the baking heat, but
that site slipped
too…
So I am in my office finishing off the report for some
recent fieldwork I did in west Nepal for the Central Himalaya Project. The project
intended (amongst other aims) to record a sample of medieval stone monuments
belonging to the Malla dynasty, evaluate the suitability of recording
techniques including photogrammetry,
and try and develop a database for future assessment and analysis. In total we recorded
58 sites, with 32 temples, assorted other sites and monuments, and over 80
architectural fragments. The fieldwork was hard work –up by 6am, lug all the gear
to site, work through the day with a short break and back at 7pm for data entry
and downloading. But the team was good, the weather was hot, the beer was ice
cold and the scenery and locals were fantastic. It didn’t exactly feel like a ‘jolly’
as all my mates called it, but it was quite nice to be sipping single malt
looking at the stars and glad there wasn’t a CSCS card for thousands of miles.
The downside of any expedition is coming home, and with
archaeology that doesn’t just mean returning to work, but writing up your
results. Fieldwork somehow always seems more ‘fun’ than the grind of
office-based Post-Ex, and there has been plenty of checking and cross-referencing
of records, data-entry, and form-filling to do. The monument gazetteer seemed
endless, the temple terminology impenetrable, and there were seemingly hundreds
of drawings to check, ‘ink up’ in Corel-Draw and work out exactly what each
stone fragment might represent.
In amongst the grind there are moments when it all comes
together, managing to reconstruct a ‘lost’ temple from fragments of stone, the
satisfaction of finding that your thoughts on temple architecture were echoed
by published works, the realisation that common motifs and styles were being
used across hundreds of miles and on a wide variety of monuments of both Hindu
and Buddhist origin.
The
draft report is now complete, its 160 pages, 42,000 words, and nearly 100 illustrations.
At times when writing it I wished I hadn’t recorded so many monuments, but now,
having completed the work I just want to go back and record more!
I was meant to be working on site today; at
less than an hour’s drive up the road it would have made a pleasant change from
working several hours’ drive away, but the site start date has slipped. It’s a
fairly common occurrence and can happen for any number of reasons, sometimes
down to delays in planning permission or due to other construction work, the
client’s cash flow, or sometimes just the weather. Sometimes sites go into
apparent hibernation and only resurface months or even years down the line,
when suddenly you get a call or an email saying that 'the footings are being
pulled next week, where are you'!
On this occasion it is due to planning
control and not yet having the Written Scheme of Investigation signed off –this
is the document that says what we will do on site (and afterwards), and how we
will dig and record it, and it has to be approved by the local Planning
Archaeologist within the relevant local authority. Ours is still in limbo, so
the site can’t start.
Managing the flow of work is never easy, and
is part of the reason why site staff contracts are often short, and not
extended until the last minute –no-one knows if the work will be there on
Monday. When you are a sole trader it gets harder –you either need to be able
to clone yourself to deal with a glut of work, or find something to fill the
hours when a job slides. It is almost always outside your control, and
sometimes there seems to be little that can be done to mitigate the problem. My freelance work is luckily not restricted
to site work –I’m also an illustrator, create training materials, do
grant-funded research and I carry out post-excavation and publication work on
various archaeological projects. All this work often has slightly less
demanding deadlines than the fieldwork -it has to be done, but the deadline is
usually 'tomorrow', rather than 'yesterday'. So having a mix of different types
of projects gives me the flexibility to be able to deal with last minute delays
to sites. Picking up and putting down projects every few days isn’t the most
efficient way of working, but sometimes you have to do it: its a juggling
act.
Day to day the juggling of current jobs is
usually ok, and you do get the occasional day off to counterbalance the runs of
18 hour days required to meet deadlines. The bigger impact of slippage is in
tendering for future work as it may take a month or longer for sites or PX
programmes to go live, and all the time all your jobs are slipping, being
brought forward, and morphing from one day watching briefs into three week
excavations. The Year Planner starts to look like 4-D Tetris, and its often
only at the last moment that it all comes together.
So today, instead of digging a late
prehistoric/Roman and medieval site next to a pub in the Cotswolds, I am
finalising the report on a project I did in Nepal earlier in the year…
The downside of any expedition is coming home, and with
archaeology that doesn’t just mean returning to work, but writing up your
results. Fieldwork somehow always seems more ‘fun’ than the grind of
office-based Post-Ex, and there has been plenty of checking and cross-referencing
of records, data-entry, and form-filling to do. The monument gazetteer seemed
endless, the temple terminology impenetrable, and there were seemingly hundreds
of drawings to check, ‘ink up’ in Corel-Draw and work out exactly what each
stone fragment might represent.
