Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

Over the course of 2017 I’ve published some 63 posts of varying kinds, that garnered just under 70,000 views. As the year is drawing to a close, I just wanted to thank everyone who has read, shared, and (hopefully) enjoyed some of the content along the way. For those who missed out and would like to catch up, here are the Top 10 posts from 2017, plus a final, end-of-year plug for two posts that I really enjoyed writing that, I think, should have been a bit more widely read than they were. Again, my thanks for reading in 2017 … I’m already working on a large number of posts for 2018, so I hope to catch your interest with some of those too! 10) Glendalough: St Saviour's Priory 9) Ain't talkin', justwalkin'. Carrying a dead man's shield 8) Bronze Age burials at The Mound of the Hostages, Tara 7) Spiral staircase. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin 6) Three Sides Live |Professor Etienne Rynne Lectures | October 1994 | Part III 5) D...

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...

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...

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...