ABSTRACT
The same awareness of heritage has also seen archaeology’s remit widening in both scope and detail; its chronological interests lap up against the present, with industrial archaeology (its history is sketched in Chapter 17) now including redundant plant of all kinds reecting
the quantum leaps of twentieth-century and today’s technologies in methods of energy generation, transportation and bulk processing. Moreover, a more recent eld of enquiry susceptible to archaeological approaches covers other aspects of the twentieth, and soon the twenty-rst, centuries, where memory as well as material remains provide a new stimulus to archaeological endeavours not fully evident when the rst edition was published (Chapter 18). Among these are military monuments and landscapes; thus the remaining tank-traps and other defensive installations on the beaches of Britain around which today’s later-career archaeologists played as children are now a focus of academic attention and heritage interest (Figure 1.1). Some are Scheduled Ancient Monuments. In sum, archaeology is dened more broadly, and the archaeological community that researches, manages and monitors this resource is substantially larger and more diverse than it was a generation ago. Even though many archaeological jobs remain precarious, far more individuals earn their living from British archaeology in one of its many guises than was the case in 1950, or indeed 1999, when the rst edition of this book appeared. The most recent analysis available (Aitchison and Edwards 2008) suggests that the total British archaeological workforce in 2007/8 comprised around 7,000 individuals compared with fewer than 4,500 10 years earlier.
