Alienation and Redemption: The Praxis of (Roman) Archaeology in Britain

Abstract

The TRAC session that led to this series of combined mini-papers was consciously designed as a forum for discussion, the aim being to consider how to tackle perceived systemic problems in the archaeology of Roman Britain (as much as the archaeology of other periods) that lead to destructive methods, interpretive fallacies and poor job satisfaction. The shared feeling of those present seemed to be that the systems prevalent in both developer-funded (or ‘commercial’) archaeology, university archaeology departments and even in the museum context are overly driven by ideas of competition, division and acquisition for its own sake, the apparently dominant neoliberal values of our time. Such values are not akin to the valuing of the historic environment per se, but rather promote constraining hierarchies within and between organisations, and a basic lack of communication and team working.