 It's a fairly grand-sounding title that I might not quite live up to. I've heard to be talking about a project that was very close to completion, as things have happened, the world being as it is, everyone being really busy. I'm going to be more sort of talking about a project that's going to happen, about which I've done some initial investigation, just some background to the kind of world I work in. I work for this company called Wood, which is an enormous but it has a multi-disciplinary environmental assessment business unit that I work for and I work for the historic environment team. We do some archaeology, no digging, but we do some consultancy, monitoring, reporting. We do all that sort of built heritage work. We also do a bit more environmental assessment, working with a range of disciplines, I think that's one of the people to produce quite large-scale assessments and also I work a lot with architects and landscape designers to do multi-disciplinary architectural landscape design. Sometimes it's about mitigation and sometimes it's about heritage-led designs and trying to create new things that work with archaeology and heritage in the right way. But what strikes me in coming to work in this sort of company every now and a year is the way that we all collaborate and how that collaboration could maybe be restructured or rethought of as a kind of hybridity instead because all these sites that we go and look at, they involve people from different disciplines going to look at the same places and that's really, really interesting to me to start with. We all look at slightly different things. I need to apologise to Lara here who in the paper this morning said, how much you hate before reading out slides and I'm going to do exactly that. How much we all look at slightly different things when we get to these sites. We think about those things in slightly different ways. We keep slightly different notes and then we give slightly different advice and then we write, I've written slightly different reports but we write quite different reports at the end of going to these exact same places as part of the same project and what I got to thinking when I was sitting in one of these big planning meetings with a multi-disciplinary team of 20 people was that there must be things that other people write down that are good archaeology, useful archaeology, but that aren't part of what we write down when we go to sites. Somehow there's been that split. Other people are doing archaeology and vice versa of course. We must be writing stuff down when we go to sites of archaeologists. That will be at least to other people but I don't know what that is so I've been trying to talk to as many people about it as possible. Now I couldn't notice about my background. I've worked a lot as an archaeologist and as a consultant my academic background is a bit more to do with archaeology and art and trying to look at the crossovers between those, the ways that those can impact each other's working practices and I sort of got my grounding here in the shopping centre that I spent four years in not literally four years in and around learning about it and following the public artists to a part of the five million pound public art project that went alongside this development and I looked a bit at their work sure but actually I was following the process of the making stuff so I spent a lot of time walking around this place with lots of different artists and being amazed at how as I said before we go to the same place and we see different things. I might be interested in the typology of the bins in the park. Someone else is interested in how different people are sitting around and so on and that found its way into their art and into my archaeology and that's why you see me here hugging most away. It's not just about a love of 1960s stuff. I was taking this idea of art and archaeology affecting each other to create a project that will mitigate the idea of permanent solid material archive to try to create a temporary federal archive by recording the various textures of this underpass on my body. You can see a screw pressed into my face and things like that. It's all interesting I guess, a bit strange but it's all archaeology. It's all a version of archaeology that's been inspired by a lot of time working with artists as is this photo that yes you will recognise if I haven't taken the photo and where I did some work trying to create a in sort of the opposite of the previous project make a solid archive of the first google street view image of this new residential and other stuff development just outside Cambridge so I found this photo that's going to go to Google and here I am tracing the exact same bit of the floor and that's interesting and it's fun and it's archaeology. It's archaeology that's been inspired by a lot of time working with artists. I do a lot of other stuff that's kind of maybe looks a bit more familiar a bit more normal I do this sort of a lot of tours a lot of public events where I go and explore places with groups of people and try to give them theme to look at in these sites so we're very much following an architectural interpretation process from going to observe things through to making some form of conclusion about what the future could be but it's sort of looking at the stuff we would normally look at as an archaeologist we look at say I'm not sure if objects as exactly what we look at as signs or trying to find history views sounds that sort of thing in this case we suppose that between rich and poor so we can do a kind of fun thing on site but and that's had some real tangible outputs for instance this is a project I did in Thornton Heath South London when we did one of those walk-arounds this is with local people as part of a consultancy for a forthcoming then forthcoming regeneration project of the shopping street this person was looking for beauty if you can imagine archaeologists looking for beauty public archaeologists that in terms of the public you are being archaeologists looking for beauty making these sorts of notes and what that turned into was this redesign of various bits of the high street so taking what was a fairly well standard not necessarily interesting although I can see that it's quite good looking in a way camphor and turning it into something that looked nicer one of the things that people highlighted but also has this sort of map connecting the area into the wider London that sort of thing also that came out of that piece of consultancy that is another example you see here one thing that people highlighted a lot was this idea that the shopping centre was land but they didn't want the whole thing to be cut down and rebuilt so you see for instance this row of just coloured shops in the centre that was it's not quite some architects just don't push this far to you but that as a result of that art and archaeology approach to consultancy that's another one as well I don't need to say about that one so is that a hybrid practice well yes it is a hybrid practice that is entirely the result of me playing around a bit with what archaeology can be and what it can do and what we should do on site based on having spent a long time working with artists initially sort of copy their ideas and then maybe stealing their ideas a bit and then finally sort of feeling the confidence to fully adopt those inspired fully adopt that inspiration into my archaeology with the kind of rigor it takes to be a proper thing how have we done to build this into environmental assessment is that I as with many of us can find some of the day job a little bit so I'd like to think about I don't think about how you do what we do differently really quite differently and I like to start from that that point of just how people do do certain things on site in different ways and what I've been doing over the last month or so is just engaging with a few different disciplines within my office and trying to get some idea of that start point I mentioned before what we do on site what we look at what we write down and what the outcomes of that are and why they're different between different disciplines and where the archaeology is in what other people are doing on site it was only fair to put some of my own notes in I think our builders in my experience are very very individual in my note taking I quite like just to write write notes down in a book this is a piece of building's work I quite like to write notes in such like I can sort of we understand how I be walking around the building afterwards when I come to the notes that's but it can be very different for different people we're also at work trying to get rid of all that sort of thing with the scope people to work very very differently and trying to move on to this sort of as we collect that that thing that some of you are probably familiar with where you go there's a link to our GIS and you put points in and take photos and it locates them and you fill forms in that sort of thing and it's all very interesting but my first reaction to this is it's massively restricting what I like to do on site and how I like to be an archaeologist on site making me look down at the iPad instead of be be part of the archaeological landscape so I went and spoke to transport and to move from our transport team to see what I would get if I asked them for some site notes and this is what I got it's a map with lots of numbers written on it this is about a project to try to work out the logistics of a future move around town of some very large thing something they've done is they've gone and understood this whole area of I guess in terms of how wide the roads are whether there is any access restrictions on something moving around this space at some point in the future they also do a lot of other things observing traffic speeds and driver behavior measuring footways location of road signs lamp columns ballards observing cyclists pedestrian behavior the condition of the carriageway and then traffic data collection like the number of left and right terms at a junction and all of this can be archaeology it's all archaeological it's all either descriptions of material and space or some sort of analysis of people's relationships to that space but it has a completely different end point which is a transport strategy related to a particular event or a whole new bit of town I've also been speaking to noise this is about monitoring advance of construction and operation of a new site starts up with the technical details about the recording equipment but then it talks about the weather but they talk about the bird star and the animals in sheds traffic on the nearby a-road and the tractor driving through a distant field and then goes on to talk about to describe a survey point it is a quite static survey this isn't somebody walking around somebody with a noise meter trying to work out what it is that has triggered any movement in that on that meter being that sort of recording the outputs are fairly technical easily readable by those who need to do it but they also have things that I find kind of amazing like the only real description of the area that the survey happens is that they take a photo of the listening equipment which I think is absolutely great it's technical like this graph show but there is a huge really interesting archive of stuff behind it all these thoughts about what it is to be in that space at a particular time and lastly I've been talking to landscape designers this is what their notes look like they look a bit like what archaeologists look like much much neater which is maybe not a surprise these notes talk about planting they talk about access they talk about everything around these buildings maybe just because they're landscape designers but they it's interesting how they don't start to talk about the building and try to think about it also this sort of thing we're talking about the different planting and trying to phase it and I think these landscapers who I've been speaking to seem to me to be the closest to archaeology I think one of the papers before mentioned that very close link between the landscape design and archaeology what we see in those plants we see a much more holistic view of the contemporary site including both buildings and planting also they write about access how the sites are used who is there how they're moving around it fixes back to photography it's also a future thinking it's really interesting to hear that landscape designer talking about how one of things they do on sites not just loading down what's there but spend time in that space pacing out potential future interventions just to get that idea of a kind of bodily experience of that space that doesn't quite exist yet what can we learn from this right well we already collaborate with all those disciplines so things aren't in a terrible place already we are already all the same projects but can we maybe think about moving beyond collaboration into doing this thing that I've called called hybridity but it's maybe just something slightly different some themes that go between all those different those different approaches to space landscape and design sorry landscape design and transport will be interesting for me that on site thinking specifically about the future both of those think about sites in motion and movement through space and accessibility noise to me feels more static and measured but it's obviously very complex and ephemeral and with that that photo of the listening equipment and then the loading down the bird's song and the tractor driving in the field has some sort of if it's not too far not too much perspective and then pastoral beauty to it that maybe I don't quite see with the transport landscape design and noise are relatively subjective transport seems to be more objective but there are lots and lots of blurred edges between all of these different things is there a case for hybrid practice well if we add all these things up what maybe strikes me is the difference between heritage consultancy and the contemporary archaeology I think all of those different disciplines are telling contemporary archaeological stories but people who are on site who are who have archaeological degrees and archaeological backgrounds are calling themselves heritage people and doing something called heritage which seems to be intentionally excluding a lot of these different takes on site and basically carrying it down to noting down the locations of things that we can probably expect to be in a place and their condition for some sort of later use of consultancy when we overlay all those different sets of site notes we get what looks to be like a deep archaeological analysis it's not just theoretical it is directly useful for work with say setting or conservation area assessment and lots more sites slightly overrun so I've just got one last slide that I'm just going to read out for you at the level of site work we absolutely can be hybrid surveyors and aim for more holistic readings of places and spaces that will do more than connect the limited data we have to collect to write the reports to write the reports we're expected to write archaeologists I think are particularly well placed to recognize and adapt this kind of total reading of sites because I think when you put all together you get something that looks to be like archaeology anyway but some others I think if we think about hybridity it's a collaboration in certain circumstances we can be more than the sum of our parts I realize there's not much of a conclusion but it's the start of a project and maybe it's some future EAA I can tell you about how it's all um worked hopefully it is crossed um thanks