There is nothing like a recession to get everyone thinking about value– what people value in terms of personal as well as professional ethics, and more cynically about how they themselves are valued, how much their jobs are ‘worth’ both socially and economically. Issues like this are especially important to archaeologists– or at least they should be if we are to genuinely lay claim to Mortimer Wheeler’s maxim that ‘archaeologists are digging up, not things, but people’. Identifying the tangible benefits to society of archaeology is difficult at the best of times but especially so when finances are pinched; to paraphrase from the macroeconomic term, we do not produce either guns or butter, so what is the value of our contribution? How does archaeology ‘work’ in the ‘real world’ of profit and loss?
The Underwater Blogger 