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Wales has a distinctive heritage and culture along with a growing sense of nationhood. Some aspects of that heritage are under threat. Places of worship – especially the non-conformist chapels – are being turned into holiday homes, historic schools are being replaced by ‘sustainable’ alternatives, pristine upland archaeology faces being swamped by tree-planting as a carbon-mitigation measure, and maritime archaeology is at risk from large-scale wind farms.
Fortunately, there is a progressive and hard-working organisation based in Aberystwyth that works to mitigate these problems. The Royal Commission, which Sherds has the privilege to lead, records places of worship and their interiors ahead of their redevelopment. We supply historic environment data, gathered over our 115-year history, to planners so that they can avoid damaging upland archaeology and historic wrecks. We lead the Welsh heritage sector’s response to climate change based on our EU-funded CHERISH project (see CA 324). We compiled the dossier of evidence that resulted in the award of World Heritage status to the Welsh slate industry (see CA 379). We are currently engaged in a much-praised community archaeology project to investigate the history of Pendinas, one of the most-impressive hillforts in Wales.
The Commission has integrated intangible history into its work, and is busy recording the lived experience of Ugandan Asians who found sanctuary in Wales after having been expelled by Idi Amin in 1972. This widely admired project has the potential to be the first of many celebrating the contribution of diaspora communities to the social, economic, and cultural life of the nation. We have encouraged young people to engage with Welsh culture through our Unloved Heritage project, and we help to sustain the Welsh language through our historic place-names list, which is used by local authorities for naming new streets as well as housing, industrial, and shopping estates. We are working with the Foundation for Jewish Heritage to reconstruct the original appearance of the synagogue in Merthyr and to turn it into a Heritage Centre presenting the centuries-old history of the Jewish community of Wales (see CA 376).
Budget cuts
All this, and much more, is being achieved by 28 highly motivated staff with a shoestring budget of £1.6m. As a reward for our outstanding achievement, the Government has announced that our budget will be cut next year by 22% to £1.413m. This is less than our wages bill, and we will run out of money around Christmas 2024 unless we take steps to reduce the headcount. With a much-reduced team, our capacity to continue with many elements of our work will be severely constrained.
Cadw faces the same percentage cut, and three other cultural institutions in Wales are being cut by 10%: the National Library, the National Museum, and Arts Council Wales. Culture has been singled out for brutal cuts when spending in the rest of Welsh Government is down by less than 5% and spending on Health and Social Services – the biggest element by far in the Welsh budget – is up by 2.63%.
Many of us in Wales have spent 18 months drafting an ambitious and visionary Culture Strategy, which we had hoped to launch later this year. Instead, the institutions that would have delivered the strategy are preoccupied with planning for large-scale redundancies and the closing down of core functions.
Andrew Green, former chief executive of the National Library and now an influential commentator on the cultural scene, has characterised this as a ‘war on culture’, and contrasts this with a recent speech given by the Scottish Deputy First Minister, who has announced a £15.8 million increase in spending on the arts and culture in Scotland, promising that this is the first step towards doubling expenditure to at least £100 million by 2028-2029. ‘The transformational power of our culture is immense,’ she said, not only for enabling ‘individuals and organisations to realise their potential’, but also for ‘attracting people from all over the world who want to come here and experience it first-hand’.
Similar increases in spending on heritage and culture have been announced in England and Northern Ireland, leaving Wales out of step. As Andrew Green puts it, the Welsh Government suffers from ‘a fatal lack of understanding and lack of vision about the role of culture and the arts in how we live and how we’re seen by people outside Wales’. Anyone whose life is enhanced by the arts and heritage, or who cares about their social, economic, and health benefits ‘should be deeply worried’, he says, ‘by a government whose members can’t manage to grasp the critical importance of maintaining and improving state support for cultural bodies and individuals’. Needless to say, the money cultural bodies receive is infinitesimally small and would not keep the NHS in Wales going for more than a few minutes.
Fewer PhDs
Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is a scholar whose PhD drew conclusions about the political, economic, and social development of Rome and Latium in the period before 500 BC, based on Latin and Greek writing and archaeological evidence. Such fundamental research reflects the requirement that a PhD be based on a substantial engagement with primary data and that it should make a new and original contribution to knowledge.
Increasingly, though, such research-based PhDs are giving way to a new model. Towards the end of 2023, the AHRC announced that it expects to fund one quarter fewer PhD students, reducing from 425 to around 300 new studentships per year by 2029-2030. At the same time, it is introducing new ‘Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs)’.
Modelled on the ways in which scientific research is conducted, a CDT is typically formed by a consortium of universities and non-academic partners. Rather than focusing on individual research, CDT programmes are designed to train groups of participants, in cohorts of varying sizes, in specific research-based skills within a structured modular programme. Participants get a PhD after successful completion of the four-year programme, during which time their tuition fees are paid and they receive a stipend of at least £18,622 to cover living expenses (higher in London).
All the research councils are adopting this approach in future and funding will be targeted at ‘skills shortages that address the greatest challenges facing our society and communities today’. The AHRC has identified ‘the creative economy’ and ‘the arts and humanities for a healthy planet, people, and place’ as their first two priority themes (Wales take note). The aim is to turn out students trained in practical skills and academic knowledge, capable of developing careers in their chosen specialities.
It is difficult to know whether to deplore or applaud this fundamental change of direction. Arguably, there are too many people doing PhDs, desperately seeking new research topics and disappearing into the sterile realms of theoretical archaeology, or focusing on increasingly narrow topics. PhD theses have become formulaic and too many are simply ‘better and more comprehensive stamp collections’ with little by way of true originality. PhDs have also been seen as the main route into an academic career, though the skills required to undertake research do not necessarily make you a competent teacher – often quite the opposite.
If Centres for Doctoral Training do succeed in turning out postgraduates with the core of scientific, statistical, and computing skills essential to the modern practice of archaeology, combined with an aptitude for collaborative research, and the ability to inspire and mentor students – perhaps to think, write, and communicate with clarity, too – then they are to be welcomed. But given the rate at which university departments of archaeology (and other branches of the humanities and social sciences) are being reduced or closed, one wonders whether there will be jobs for these well-trained PhDs to go to.
The Archaeology Data Service
Congratulations to Professor Julian D Richards on his appointment to the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours list. Julian is the founder and director of the Archaeology Data Service – the only repository for digital research data to have survived of the several that were set up in the 1990s. Funding for the others was gradually withdrawn on the assumption that UK universities would fill the gap and set up their own institutional repositories. Few have done so, and UK research institutions lack a long-term strategy for digital preservation. It is time this changed: the opportunities to work across disciplines and interrogate data from many different sources is being lost. UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) should spend some of its generous infrastructure budget on creating a much-needed digital repository for the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
