ABSTRACT
This chapter spans two decades of extraordinary change in the organisation, direction and levels of funding for archaeology in Britain. Rescue archaeology, developer funding, archaeological units, new legislation, restructured national agencies, cultural resource management; all these were in the future in 1970. Government funding rose sharply and many towns and suburban areas, in particular, saw high levels of archaeological excavation whose cost was increasingly met by alternative sources of funding during the 1980s. Medieval archaeology did not wholeheartedly embrace the latest conceptual developments in the discipline but benefited from the introduction of a wide range of new scientific techniques, establishing itself firmly in university departments. The first, widely influential, synthesis of results was written by Colin Platt (1978a) and followed by assessments from Fowler (1980), Hinton (1983), Clarke (1984), Steane (1984), Cherry (1986) and Hurst (1986).The year 1989 is a convenient cut-off point for the funding and theoretical developments discussed here.
