Council for Independent Archaeology

The 2011 conference of the Council for Independent Archaeology was held at Swadlincote, Derbyshire on the 27th November 2011. The conference was held in the Sharpes Pottery Museum: over 40 people attended, the lecture theatre was full, we had excellent lectures and wonderful food. Our thanks are due to Keith and Barbara Foster for arranging it all so brilliantly. Click here for the conference programme.

One of the highlights of the conference was that we heard from Bob Randall who produces our resistivity meter for us. Production has been halted due to the EEC directive on lead soldering but Bob gave us details of how he hopes to produce an updated version of the meter which will get round this. Click here for details of the resistivity meter.

The Council for Independent Archaeology is intended to bring together independent archaeologists —that is archaeologists who are independent of government funding. We sometimes proudly call ourselves amateur archaeologists, and we represent the hard-core of local archaeological societies and many local societies are members. Recent decades have seen a welcome upsurge in professional archaeology, but we aim to support and give confidence to amateur archaeologists and to emphasise the role that they have to play in archaeology. Professional archaeologists are of course welcome to join the Council, and we value their advice and support.

Much archaeology is currently being done by community archaeologists, who play another valued role in archaeology. Community archaeologists however differ in that they usually depend on a grant from outside sources, often the lottery fund, which means that they tend to have a slightly different emphasis to the pure independent archaeologist. However the line between independent and community archaeology is very narrow and we welcome all ‘ community’ archaeologists into the ‘independent’ fold.

At the Congress I put forth some ideas about a survey into church archaeology which I hope to put up on these pages shortly.

We aim to hold the next Congress in September 2012 but we still do not have any venue arranged, so if you or your society would like to suggest a venue, please e-mail me or our Treasurer, Keith Foster, as soon as possible.

Our secretary has had to resign due to personal reasons and we are looking for a replacement. We are always looking for new members of the committee and if you are interested, please contact me or our Hon. Treasurer, Keith Foster. Or if you would simply like to join the council and find out what we are doing, please click here.

Good digging!

Andrew Selkirk

Andrew Selkirk, webmaster, 17th October 2011