Archaeology and the global economic crisis. Multiple impacts, possible solutions (ed. Nathan Schlanger and Kenneth Aitchison)

Abstract

The texts presented here are extended and updated versions of the papers given at a session entitled “Archaeology and the global crisis - multiple impacts, possible solutions”, held on the 17th September 2009 at the 15th annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) in Riva del Garda, Italy. As coorganisers of this session, we were particularly happy to see that over a hundred colleagues attended and took part in some lively discussions, where sober realism was mixed with hope and determination. The session furthermore benefitted from the friendly atmosphere and excellent organisation of the EAA meeting itself, as skilfully orchestrated by Franco Nicolis together with Martina Dalla Riva, their teams and sponsors. Indeed the European Association of Archaeologists as a whole, so we feel, has amply fulfilled its vocation as meeting-ground and think-tank for professional archaeologists from Europe and beyond (http://www.e-a-a.org). We are grateful in any case that our session at Riva del Garda was sponsored – in an intellectual sense – by three EAA committees or working parties. One is the “Committee on archaeological legislation and organisation in Europe”, chaired by Christopher Young and Jean-Paul Demoule: the crisis and the structural changes that follow make the critical and comparative work of this committee more important than ever before. Further support was received from the “Committee on professional associations in archaeology”, chaired by Kenneth Aitchison, a committee that is acutely concerned with working practices in European archaeology and how they are being affected by the economic situation. The third and most recently created of these EAA groups is the working party on “ACE - Archaeology in contemporary Europe: professional practices and public outreach” (www.ace-archaeology. eu) – a European Commission ‘Culture’ programme funded network gathering a dozen of partners from across the continent to examine together the fields of practice and social dimensions of contemporary archaeology. In addition to the invaluable material support provided by the ACE network, many of its partners contributed their comments and insights to the preparation of the ‘Crisis’ session, and also through subsequent meetings in Thessaloniki (with our Aristotle University partner) and in Budapest (with our KÖH partner). In this volume, ACE partners have contributed the chapters on the situations in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Poland. Another relevant European initiative is the “Discovering the Archaeologists of Europe” project (www.discovering-archaeologists.eu), a review of the archaeological labour market in twelve European Union states with the support of the European Commission ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ programme in 2006-2008. As data for the project were collected in 2007, at the height of the economic cycle, they give us very valuable information and insights for critical comparisons with the ongoing crisis situation.