Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Screenshot of the current state of the Tableau visualisation. Data shown ranges from 1998-2016 The evenings are drawing in and the chill winds whistle around the door. It can only mean one thing! Yes, gentle reader, it’s time to take a look at how Northern Ireland’s archaeological consultancies fared in 2016. As I’ve done before, the data from their end-of-year accounts, submitted to Companies House, has been extracted and used to create an interactive dashboard that the reader can investigate and interrogate at will.   As Archaeological Development Services (ADS) have been dissolved, and play no part in the current archaeological scene in Northern Ireland, we’ll not deal with them further, other than to note that their data remains available within the dashboard. Gahan and Long. All Financial KPIs, 2003-2016 Gahan and Long (G&L) Gahan and Long was formed in 2002 and is run by Chris Long and Audrey Mary Louise Gahan. In 2016 their Cash at Bank increased margin...

Introduction It’s that time of year again … the evenings are dark and cold … we’ve put up the tree and are listening to carols … you’re writing Christmas cards … and Chapple is poring over financial statements for several archaeological consultancies … it’s tradition! Since 2014 I’ve tried to keep tabs on how the commercial archaeological sector in Northern Ireland is faring financially [ here | here | here ]. Initially, the data went from 2007/2008 to 2013 and was presented as a series of static tables and graphs created in MS Excel. As I have added in the latest data when it became available, I have also endeavoured to push back the start date, to provide the most complete portrait possible. Now the data goes back to 1998 for one company and their earliest sets of accounts for each of the other three consultancies operating in Northern Ireland. I have also moved away from the static graphs to a dynamic, interactive visualisation of the data, created in Tableau Public [ here...

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the Tip Jar on the right of the page. Alternatively, using The Reading Room portal (top of page) for shopping with Amazon brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] < Appendix Introduction At the end of 2015 I took a look at the financial health of the Northern Irish commercial archaeology sector ( Another turn round the plughole? Commercial Archaeology in Northern Ireland in 2014 ). This, in turn was a follow-on from two previous posts on the topic, chronicling the post 2008 collapse of the market and its sustained failure to recover [ here | here ]. These posts have made use of the publicly available data submitted by these enterprises as part of their end-of-year accounts and hosted by, for example, Company Check . The available data was time limited, only going back to 2007 – and that only for one Company. For the other three NI Companies, the data only started in 2008, as the crash hap...

[If you like what I write, please consider throwing something in the Tip Jar on the right of the page. Alternatively, using the site portals for shopping on either Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk brings in some advertising revenue and costs you nothing] As we rapidly plunge towards the end of another year, many people’s minds turn to Yule festivities, gifting, feasting, quaffing and all the joys that the Winter Solstice has to offer. For myself, I find my mind turning to the financial health of the archaeological sector in Northern Ireland, because that’s just how I roll. In what is becoming something of a year-end tradition, I’ve been looking at a number of Key Financials for the four main archaeological consultancies in Northern Ireland. Previous posts have analysed the period from 2011-2012 and 2013 . A recent post on the commercial archaeological sector in the Republic of Ireland made use of a Tableau dashboard to display the data and allow a degree of user interactivity beyond ...