Roundhouses and railways: developer-funded archaeology in England

Abstract

These two volumes result from extensive developer-funded fieldwork in north-western Northamptonshire, in the English midlands. Under the system introduced in 1990, local authority curatorial archaeologists assess the impact upon archaeological remains of planning applications, and make recommendations for any further investigative work. Developers are normally responsible for the costs of any archaeological evaluation or excavation work necessary, and they award the contracts to commercial field units who bid for this work in a competitive tendering process. Since 1990, there has been an enormous increase in the volume of such archaeological work in Britain and other European countries (Bradley et al. 2016), and these two volumes are representative of many of the best and worst aspects of this system.