MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT AND THE CASE FOR HYBRID PRACTICE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 28/01/2021

This paper will present a case study of how historic environment professionals work with other disciplines within one environmental assessment business. Typically, any site or project will involve practitioners of a number of different disciplines, each looking at the same place in their different ways and feeding back to people who weigh up those different perspectives and use them to create or refine aspects of planning and design. Although I admit that this paper will not provide a critical case study as such, I will present thoughts arising from engagement with different disciplines in my own workplace to address the following issues: whether we can work better (or at all) with each other’s data; whether, or in what  circumstances, we should stand alone as consultants, and when should we overtly collaborate; what realistic scope there is for the evaluation of different disciplinary concerns at much earlier stages of design projects; and how far it is practically possible, or even desirable, to cross-skill individuals on a meaningful scale. To conclude, I will address the question of whether we might more regularly diversify our working practices to consider using inter- disciplinary ‘hybrid archaeologies’ to suit different kinds of sites and projects. If we can conceive of these different, experimental hybrid archaeologies and think they might be useful, who will be the hybrid archaeologists?


Publication from this presentation:



https://www.academia.edu/42306926/DEFINING_NEW_VALUES_FOR_CAVEMEN_AND_FINDING_THE_HUMAN_IN_HERITAGE