Archaeology and the global financial crisis

Introduction

At the start of the twenty-first century, the industrialised world experienced a prolonged episode of economic growth financed by borrowing. This led to overstimulated housing markets, supported by unsustainable bank lending. House prices in the United States began to fall in 2005, and when, late in the summer of 2007, those falling prices revealed the extent to which 'banks had been aggressively promoting loans to those who had previously been on the margins - subprime borrowers' (Turner 2008: 57), the process that was to lead to a global financial crisis was triggered.

On Friday 10 August 2007, the FTSE-100 index fell by 3.9 per cent, its biggest single day loss for more than four years. This was the onset of the credit crunch, leading to an ongoing period of financial instability and volatility in the markets. Over the 15 months between August 2007 and November 2008, there were a further nine days when the London stock exchange suffered even greater losses (Guardian 2008a) - but over that same period there were six days when the markets recorded some of the 20 biggest daily rises in the index's history (Guardian 2008b).

As this stock market volatility has been caused by issues relating to inter-bank borrowing underpinned by mortgage lending, the direct effect upon the housing market was immediate. The reduction in the availability of mortgage funds led to falling housing prices. August 2007 was the high point of a UK property boom that had been ongoing since 1991, with property prices falling in every subsequent month to the time of writing in mid-November 2008 (Land Registry 2008).

The falling prices have directly led to a decline in the volume of housing construction work. The value of new build residential construction fell by 26.3 per cent in the year to September 2008 (Glenigan 2008) and the number of applications for planning permission has fallen in each quarter since the end of June 2007 (DCLG 2008). The reduction in housing construction has also led to a fall in the levels of associated activities, including archaeology.

Archaeological practice in the UK

Archaeology in the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century is a very young industry; 40 years ago there was almost no concept of any practice that could be recognised as commercial archaeology. It is also a very small industry; the total workforce is in the order of 7000 people and employers are typically small-medium enterprises (Aitchison & Edwards 2008).

The industry is currently a largely commercialised practice, with work primarily generated and mediated through the democratic processes of local government via the planning control system. Governments have recognised archaeological remains as an environmental asset and policy towards managing threats to this resource has established the framework within which archaeological practice has developed.

Over time, the primary source of funding for commercial archaeology has steadily shifted from central government to the private sector.

The principal threat to the archaeological resource is and has been land use change through development, primarily for housing and infrastructure (Darvill & Fulton 1998). This has meant that commercial archaeology has become very closely linked - even dependent upon - the construction industry throughout the economic cycle, as 58 per cent of archaeological posts are directly funded by income generated by work related to development and the planning process (Aitchison & Edwards 2008: 12; comparable data have also been collected by Everill [2007 and 2008]).

Within commercial archaeology, unregulated growth associated with the construction boom has resulted in a proliferation of small companies which have been able to survive on the very edges of viability and some of which operate at the extreme margins of good practice. Competition has been embraced on a price-led rather than quality basis and in this market 'archaeological contractors are very under-capitalised, work on extremely small margins and frequently yield annual surpluses of under 5%' (Darvill & Russell 2002: 73).

The volume of archaeological work

The current and previous Governments' overall economic policies are highly reliant upon the strength of the property market (Cossons 2002). The UK is almost unique in terms of high-levels of property ownership, and the Government seeks to be able to support this through policies aimed at maintaining high levels of private investment in property.

The 1991-2007 housing boom led to a great deal of development-led archaeological work; present Government housing policy prioritises the use of previously developed, 'brownfield' land (DCLG 2006). By the very nature of having been previously occupied and used, these sites are inherently more likely to be of archaeological significance. This policy has also tended to lead to relatively small-scale, infill development, and so it is relatively rare that brownfield development results in sizable archaeological projects.

By 2006 there was more archaeological work being undertaken in the UK than at any previous time. The Archaeological Investigations Project (AIP pers. comm. 17 October 2008) considers that there were 4800 archaeological fieldwork investigations in England in 2006, of which 4458 (93 per cent) had been initiated through the planning process.

These factors combined to mean that, by late 2007, archaeological contractors were typically working on relatively small scale projects with narrow profit margins.

The value of archaeological work

The total value of the UK construction industry's output in 2004 was £104.2bn (DTI 2005).

A report by CgMs to the Corporation of London (Corporation of London 2001) estimated that the cost of archaeological assessment/evaluation generally amounts to 0.1 per cent of total construction costs. The cost of excavation and recording (when required) is likely to be between 1 per cent and 3 per cent of the total costs (Corporation of London 2001: 1).

However, these figures are difficult to use to calculate the value of the archaeological work being undertaken. In Hinton and Jennings (2007), this author provided an estimate of the amount of spending on commercial archaeology that used calculations which were based on the numbers of planning applications that had archaeological impact (to determine growth) and reported staffing costs (as a base line from which full income was extrapolated), to generate a figure of £144m being provided by developers to archaeology in 2004 - equating to 0.14 per cent of the overall cost of construction in the country.

How archaeology has been affected by past times of financial crisis

The Great Depression of the 1930s, which followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, did not affect commercial archaeology as this did not exist either in concept or practice anywhere in the world at that time. However, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which intended to refloat the economy through state investment in capital projects, state monies were used to finance archaeological work during the 1930s. Jameson (2004) discusses the impact on archaeological practice of the Tennessee Valley Authority's dam building programme, where extensive excavations were funded ahead of the construction works and subsequent flooding of valleys.

In the United Kingdom, the recession at the start of the 1980s was tackled through the then Government's use of tight monetary and fiscal controls in order to reduce inflation. Even following the period of technical recession (when the economy shrank) in 1980-81, mass unemployment continued through most of that decade. Through the Community Programme of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), a governmental agency established to introduce unemployment relief measures, a very significant number of archaeological projects were funded. Participants on MSC projects had to be long-term unemployed and the work that they undertook had to be seen to be providing community benefits, into which some archaeological projects fell. The archaeological projects supported tended to be excavation and post-excavation processing, 'as this is a labour intensive activity which has high public visibility' (Crump 1987: 42).

This led to a situation where British archaeology actually came to become significantly reliant upon MSC funding. The then Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments at English Heritage, Geoffrey Wainwright, stated (in Sheldon 1986: 2) that '...if the MSC pulled out it would have an absolutely catastrophic effect on the ability to undertake excavations. The great bulk of labour costs is now being met by MSC'. Numerically, this was certainly the case. In 1986-87, 2640 people were working in 'rescue archaeology' (Plouviez 1988: 8) of whom 1790 (68 per cent) were financed by the MSC (Crump 1987: 45).

The Manpower Services Commission ended its work at a time when unemployment was falling as the level of economic activity, including construction, was increasing rapidly. This was leading to increasing amounts of money coming in to archaeology from developers - 'The loss of MSC funding to archaeology appears to have been cushioned by the massive growth in developer funding' (Spoerry 1992: 30). By 1990-91, 48 per cent of archaeological funding was being provided by developers (ibid. : 32); four years previously the equivalent figure had been 17 per cent (Plouviez 1988: 1).

This recognition that developers were prepared to fund archaeological work, which had been going on for some time, although in an unregulated and at times ad hoc way that was not mediated through the planning system - coincided with a number of other factors, foremost of which was the Government's concern that the increasing costs of archaeological intervention should not fall on the public purse. This led to policy being introduced as Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning (DOE 1990), abbreviated to PPG 16, formalised the position of developer-funding for archaeology.

PPG 16 was published in November 1990 and established archaeology's place in the spatial planning system. However, this almost precisely coincided with the onset of another period of recession which impacted particularly hard on archaeology in London. The late 80s had seen a remarkable amount of development in and around the City of London which led to previously unprecedented amounts of archaeological work being undertaken. Even pre-PPG 16 this was normally being funded by developers and so the economic downturn in the autumn of 1990 then impacted particularly heavily on the Museum of London, where approximately 300 staff were made redundant (Young & O'Sullivan 1991).

However, from 1991, the economy began to recover. Construction restarted and archaeological work, with PPG 16 firmly in place, expanded rapidly. While some archaeological businesses did fail in the mid-1990s, particularly inflexible business units within local government structures, the place of these were always immediately filled by new organisations, and the expansion of archaeological practice, fuelled by the constantly increasing demand from developers, continued until 2007.

Archaeology in the present crisis

It is very difficult to judge the impact the financial crisis has had on archaeology to date. There is a paucity of solid statistical data; the most recent labour market intelligence data was collected immediately before the crisis had begun to impact.

Anecdotally, by the autumn of 2008, different companies were being affected in different ways. There has been an overall reduction in the volume of work available which has meant that organisations have been taking on fewer temporary staff; before the crisis, approximately only one third of archaeologists who undertook field investigation as their primary working role were on temporary contracts (Aitchison & Edwards 2008: 84) - but 71 per cent of those working in the most junior of on-site roles, those of excavator or site assistant had short-term contracts (ibid. : 183). In November 2008 more than one major archaeological contractor was in formal discussions with staff about job losses, with field staff apparently particularly at risk.

The reduction of work is not uniform, by organisation size, specialised areas or location. But managers are reporting order books that are far less full than they have been. There has been a sense that pre-determination work (archaeological work that is undertaken in order to support a planning application, such as evaluations and desk-based assessments) is continuing to be undertaken, but there is much less post-determination mitigation work (such as excavation of a site that is to be developed, so fulfilling the conditions of planning permission).

However, pre-determination work will not continue to be initiated at the same rate, as builders are not expanding their 'land banks' of ground where planning permission has already been granted and so is ready for development.

In the summer of 2007, immediately before the crisis began to affect the housing market, the Royal Town Planning Institute reported that outstanding planning permissions for nearly 225 000 homes, which gave the ten largest housebuilders in the UK 2.7 years of supply at the then current rates of building (RTPI 2007: 3).

However, given that, under the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, planning permission only lasts for three years, the collapse of the housing market may mean that builders are left with an oversupply of land which they will not be able to use to its full economic potential (RTPI 2007: 4). House builders have already written off nearly £1.8 billion from the value of their land banks (Whitten 2008).

The Archaeological Investigations Project tracks the number of archaeological reports deposited with local planning authorities' Historic Environment Records. It thus provides an indicator of the amount of archaeological work undertaken. Provisional estimates, extrapolated from both the (incomplete) material already gathered for 2007/08 and comparison between the past collected numbers of reports and data from the Department of Communities and Local Government on the number of planning applications made, suggest that the number of reports (and hence the volume of work) will have dropped from the 2006-07 high of 4800 to 4474 reports for 07-08 (a drop of 7 per cent) and 4158 for 08-09 (a projected drop of 13 per cent over two years) (AIP pers. comm. 17 October 2008). This suggests that commercial archaeology is undergoing a rapid transformation, from an industry that had been growing at between 4 per cent and 5 per cent per annum over the ten years to 2007-08 and was looking bullishly to the future (Aitchison & Edwards 2008: 41-2, 124) to become one that may be contracting by 6-7 per cent each year.

The current absence of major infrastructure works with significant archaeological requirements, such as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link or Heathrow Terminal 5, means that there are no super-projects to compensate for this downturn. These projects have been of such a size that they absorb so much of the archaeological workforce that there is a knock-on effect, regionally and nationally of reduction in capacity to deliver archaeological services which effectively allows those companies that are not directly involved in the infrastructure projects to remain highly active. The archaeological work on the Birmingham North Relief Road (M6 Toll) between 2000 and 2003 had this effect across the midlands and north of England, while the M74 Completion project (a motorway running to the south of Glasgow) had the same effect on Scottish archaeology between the summer of 2007 and the spring of 2008.

Keynesian spending

Given archaeology's relationship with construction and development, it would appear that the only prospect of an improvement in the industry's situation will be through a revival of that sector. Until market conditions favour the renewal of housebuilding and associated infrastructural development, the private sector is unlikely to provide the catalyst for this.

The Government considers that capital spending could be the way to restart the economy. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph (Hennessey 2008), the Chancellor of the Exchequer Alastair Darling has indicated that, as 'This is a time when you have to support the economy', he is in favour of bringing forward and using public spending on big construction projects such as the 2012 London Olympics and the Crossrail train link in London to generate employment and release capital into the economy. By doing so, the Chancellor will be following the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, the advocate of government intervention at times of depression and whose A General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) provided the theoretical foundations for Roosevelt's New Deal. At the time of writing, the details of the Government's plans were due to be released in the Chancellor's forthcoming Pre-Budget Report.

Although it will be slow to come fully on stream, capital spending on infrastructure will without doubt support archaeology. These are big plans that the Government was always intending to carry out, and so to bring them forward will be politically expedient. The other huge potential driver will be the Thames Gateway. Under the Sustainable Communities Plan of 2003 (ODPM 2003), the Government has identified that one of the principal routes through which it aims to actively support new housing development will be by 'focusing growth in four areas in the wider South East (Thames Gateway, London-Stansted-Cambridge corridor, Ashford, and Milton Keynes-South Midlands) ' (HM Treasury & ODPM 2005: 40), with the intention of building 200 000 new homes over and above previous development plan intentions over the next 20 years. 80 per cent of this work will be in the Thames Gateway area to the east of London. This work has yet to begin on the ground, and will be undertaken over a long time period, but it has the latent capacity to potentially generate huge amounts of archaeological work. However, this was planned at a time when lack of housing supply was seen as a key issue, leading to overheating of the housing market and rising house prices making it increasingly difficult for new entrants to buy houses; with prices falling, it will be more difficult for the Government to incentivise house builders to commit to work in this area, but the lack of supply remains a critical issue.

As noted above, capital spending on infrastructure was supporting archaeology as long ago as the 1930s through the New Deal. In Greek archaeology, the scale of construction projects associated with the 2004 Athens Olympic Games meant that there was a significant (although temporary) growth in the number of archaeologists working in Greece, both in fieldwork (during the construction and pre-construction phases) and post-excavation, continuing for up to three years following the games (Pantos et al. 2008: 12). Ironically, one of the alternative sources of funding that UK archaeology has been able to access, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) is having to reduce its direct commitments to grant aid projects, as monies are diverted to contribute towards the costs of the 2012 London Olympics (HLF 2008: 3-4). This will not help to sustain archaeological practice as the archaeological fieldwork phase of the Olympic development was largely undertaken in 2006 and 2007 and is now essentially complete. Previously, the HLF supported archaeological projects with a total of £90m from 1994-95 to 2004-05 (HLF 2006), an average of £9m per annum.

Conclusions

Archaeological practice, as the interpretation and management of the historic environment, is undertaken for the public benefit but is funded by private enterprise.

If development does not take place, then the archaeological resource is not damaged. Some will actually see a reduction in the amount of archaeological work being undertaken as a good thing - discussing conservation in general and archaeology in particular, Oliver Rackham wrote that 'Too much money has done more damage than too little. "The recession came just in time to save Barchester", as an archaeologist with Barsertshire County Council remarked to me' (Rackham 2003: 208). But this is a short-termist fallacy. The economy works in cycles; the recovery will come, just as it did after the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, construction will start anew and there will be demand for archaeologists to work ahead of and alongside development. However, if archaeologists are losing their jobs and dropping out of the already under-rewarded sector, then there will be a shortfall of skilled, experienced practitioners when the upswing returns.

In Japan, archaeological practice is also mediated through the planning system. By 1995, there were approximately 7000 people working as archaeologists in Japan (Okamura 2008), and investment in Japanese archaeology reached a peak in 1997 of 132 billion yen ($1.14bn US). By 2005 this had fallen to 76 billion yen (Mizunoe 2007: 31, quoted in Okamura & Matsuda forthcoming). This was due to the ongoing effects of a stock market crash in 1990 and subsequent collapse of the housing market (Turner 2008); in Osaka City in 2004, development was taking place at only one third of its mid 90s peak (Okamura & Matsuda forthcoming). This has not led to archaeological practice collapsing - but it has, rather than sharply contracting, stagnated. There have been some job losses, but more frequently archaeological employers have frozen new employment, some not having taken on new staff for over ten years (Okamura & Matsuda forthcoming).

In Ireland, there was a remarkable level of employment in archaeology in 2007 where approximately 1700 archaeologists were working, an increase of 263 per cent over five years previously (McDermott & La Piscopia 2008: 5), meaning that there was one archaeologist for every 2340 people in the country - 0.04 per cent of the population. By comparison, there was 1 archaeologist for every 8740 people in the United Kingdom and 1 archaeologist for every 46 700 people in Germany (Aitchison in prep). Of those archaeologists working in Ireland, a remarkable 45 per cent were non-nationals, archaeologists who had moved from other countries to Ireland to work. Such was the level of demand that it could be economically advantageous for a team of Polish archaeologists, working on a major road scheme, to undertake all of their recording in Polish and have their reports translated subsequently (Margaret Gowen pers. comm. ). Anecdotally, the situation in Ireland has changed. The end of the building boom came to Ireland earlier in 2007 than it did to the United Kingdom, and it is believed that considerably less archaeological work is now being done and that far fewer non-Irish archaeologists are involved.

Retrospectively, the size of the archaeological workforce in Ireland and the possibly apocryphal stories about foreign workers makes it clear that the business of Irish archaeology was overheated. But it does show that transnational mobility within archaeology is real. Skilled, competent fieldworkers can move from country to country to find work when it is available. In countries where commercialised archaeology is the norm, as is the case in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, the sector benefits from having a flexible workforce, with employers well positioned to be able to take on employees on a project-by-project basis. This is not always to the benefit of individual archaeologists, who have to cope as best they can with a shrinking or (as in Japan) a standstill working environment, neither of which present many new opportunities.

Individual archaeologists will have to adopt an entrepreneurial attitude to ensure that they are as employable as possible, looking to enhance their skills and to demonstrate their professional commitment in order to be as attractive to prospective employers as possible.

The longer the financial crisis continues to reduce the amount of development work undertaken, the deeper its impact on archaeological practice. It will almost certainly lead to businesses closing; but it may also lead to new, commercial developments. After the redundancies at the Museum of London in 1990-91, several new companies were started by former employees. The same happened after Leicestershire County Council Archaeology Unit, the Milton Keynes Archaeology Unit and the South Yorkshire Archaeology Field and Research Unit all closed in the mid-1990s. There will be an inevitable period of fissuring and consolidation, as new businesses emerge and others combine or are taken over. CAM ARC, the Cambridgeshire County Council archaeological field unit became part of the much larger Oxford Archaeology on 1 July 2008 (Cambridgeshire County Council 2008) and this is unlikely to be the last merger in the sector.

Postscript

'Property prices have been falling in the UK for just one year now, but have fallen in the US for three years. More disturbingly, prices in Japan are still falling, fully 18 years after Japan's credit bubble burst in 1990'

(Pettifor 2008: 28)

The global financial crisis is having, and will continue to have, a significant adverse affect on archaeology in the United Kingdom. The subsector that will bear the brunt of this is the commercial practices that undertake fieldwork, producing the primary data upon which all other archaeological employment and research ultimately relies.

The growth of commercial archaeology occurred in a very reactive way without much thought being given to, or responsibility taken for, the industry's development needs. It is likely that any contraction, or even stagnation, of the industry in the immediate future will happen in the same way and this might seriously impact on the industry's ability to react to the economic upturn when it eventually comes.

There is no easy way out of this. No-one, not individual archaeologists, not managers, not the professional association knows how hard the bad times will be or how long they will last. There are straightforward things that everyone can try do - it may be trite, but it is fundamentally true to say that we have to look to find new sources of revenue, cut costs, repay debts if at all possible, individually and corporately self-promote on the basis of competence and professionalism, and to simply just try harder.

However, this may yet be an opportunity for the industry. The quantity of archaeological work undertaken over the last two decades has been driven by the mantra of 'preservation by record'. This has meant that as sites have been excavated, the archaeological resource has been transformed into data. We may be able to treat the reduction in the amount of fieldwork being undertaken as an opportunity to take stock of the data that we have accumulated and to think synthetically and strategically about converting that data into better understanding of human lives in the past.

Archaeology came out of the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s transformed and stronger each time. By the end of this period of uncertainty, we can expect to have seen the publication of PPG 16's replacement, Planning Policy Statement 15: Planning for the historic environment, and potentially a Heritage Protection Bill (for England and Wales) as well. Our world is changing around us, and commercial archaeology will have to continue to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability to cope with and ultimately to profit from the new circumstances that we will find ourselves in.

Acknowledgements

Kenneth Aitchison, Head of Projects and Professional Development at the Institute for Archaeologists writes here in a personal capacity and wishes to thank many colleagues with whom he has discussed this issue and article, including Duncan Brown, Paul Everill, Kate Geary, Peter Hinton, Melanie Johnson, Ehren Milner, Ronan Toolis and Kathryn Whittington.

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Authors

Note: Author information correct at time of publication

• Kenneth Aitchison
  Head of Projects and Professional Development at the Institute for Archaeologists (Email: kenneth.aitchison@archaeologists.net)