Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Screenshot of the Tableau Dashboard. Available [ here ] and at the end of this post Background Archaeologists are supposed to be rather good at digging … out in the field it’s quite a bit of what we do. When I left field archaeology in 2011 it was, I suppose, inevitable that I would find something else to delve and dig into. One of the topics that has engaged my attention in recent years is the reconstruction of the financial histories of individual archaeological consultancies to create an impression of the sector as a whole, based on a few publicly available ‘Key Financial Indicators’. The process started with an examination of Northern Ireland’s four archaeological consultancies for the period from 2007-2013 [ here ] and, while imperfect, was sufficient to plot much of the post-2008 collapse of the industry, even if the 2013 data was only for a single company. A second post [ here ] updated the dataset with the 2013 financial details of two further companies. My original p...

< Appendix In February 2014 I published a rather lengthy piece on the recent financial history of commercial archaeology in Northern Ireland. The paper took each of the major companies and proceeded to look at their highs and lows over the period for which ‘Key Financials’ were publicly available. It then sought to average the data to provide an overall impression of the ‘health’ of the commercial archaeology scene here. For the most part, it illustrated a pattern of decay from highs up to 2008, and plunging Net Worth in the years following. At that point, only one company (incorporated in 2005) had posted results for 2013, but it was sufficient to suggest a modest recovery across the sector. By the time the 2013 results for two further companies were made public , it was clear that this one bonanza year couldn’t mask the poor performance of the other two outfits. While there was still an overall uptick in results, it was nowhere near as pronounced as it had previously seemed...

< Back to main post Based on the legal advice given to me, I have taken the decision to explicitly link the anonymised companies discussed in the main text to their actual names and data. The reason for this is to provide full transparency in where my data is coming from and so that it may be checked for accuracy and inconsistencies. I have also chosen to place it at a slight remove from the main text, so that anyone not wishing to know the details of any individual company does not have to be confronted with it. The companies are listed in the main text by a randomised three letter acronym (TLA) and that format is preserved here: AJM        [Last accessed August 24 2015] LYG         [Last accessed  August  24  2015] RTI           [Last accessed  August  24  2015] LCO         [Last accessed ...