We’ve emerged from our recent conversations about the Class Ceiling inquiry and report with three major conclusions: archaeology’s workforce crisis is fundamentally an identity crisis; we are unintentionally filtering workers before talent or competence are even considered; and archaeology itself is a culturally creative profession operating inside an economic system that obscures its real value.
Class sits beneath all three as a hidden operating condition, affecting who can enter careers, who can afford to stay, and whose labour is expected to fund the gap between our cultural value and economic reality.
The good news is that archaeology is not powerless: unlike many cultural sectors, our work already sits inside systems that contain real power capable of reshaping pay, training, stability, and long-term workforce sustainability if we choose to use them. Onwards!
In January 2026, the Greater Manchester inquiry Class Ceiling published Class Ceiling: A Review of Working Class Participation in the Arts, the pioneering Greater Manchester inquiry that sparked national conversation about who gets to build a creative career, and who gets shut out.
The report, co-chaired by Nazir Afzal OBE and researched by Matt Baker’s social consultancy RISE, documented a pattern familiar to many UK archaeologists: dependence on university pathways, a culture of low pay and voluntary labour as rites of passage, leadership concentrated in narrow socioeconomic groups, and a widening gap between diversity ambitions and the material conditions that determine who can actually enter, stay and progress. The report’s 21 recommendations, from treating class as a protected characteristic to ending unpaid work and expanding apprenticeships, go beyond diagnosis to offer a concrete blueprint for change.
So, on 8 May, DigVentures invited Nazir and Matt to DV Trends to explore what the findings might mean for UK archaeology careers. More than 200 people joined the conversation, with the live discussion unpicking specifics of the class issue in the arts which mirror years of archaeology sector evidence. By mapping the Class Ceiling findings over to our own sector, a larger structure emerges.
This piece is not an attempt to write a definitive paper about archaeology’s workforce challenges – many people and organisations across the sector have already spent years doing serious work around pay, skills, retention, accreditation, workplace culture, and access. What emerged through the DV Trends conversation was different, and included some previously unexplored ‘a-ha!’moments which have been tough to wrestle into shape – so please bear with!
The language, the patterns, and the lived experiences emerging from the Class Ceiling discussion were so familiar that we now understand them as symptoms of a set of universal conditions shaping cultural work in Britain, of which archaeology is very clearly part.
That comparison then raised a further question for DVHQ: if archaeology experiences many of the same class dynamics identified across the arts and culture sector, why has it remained mostly absent from the wider, targeted class conversations, advocacy networks, large scale bursaries, and socio-economic inclusion work that world has spent years building?
Part of the answer may lie in archaeology’s strange position between culture and construction. Development-led archaeology, which is how most archaeological excavation and research happens in the UK, has spent decades adapting itself to the systems that fund it: planning, procurement, infrastructure delivery, and programme risk. That adaptation was commercially necessary, but it has also reshaped how the profession understands and describes itself.
Professionally, archaeology behaves much more like cultural work than construction. Archaeologists interpret, conserve, narrate, educate, and contribute directly to public understanding of place and history. The high educational expectations of the profession also align far more with the wider arts and culture sector than with the industries that appear alongside us in procurement frameworks.
Economically, however, archaeology in the UK operates through systems shaped by planning law, competitive tendering, infrastructure delivery, and construction timelines. Archaeologists work under many of the same commercial pressures as project-based contractors, but without equivalent pay structures, protections, or non-university pathways.
Since 2010, responsibility for the planning frameworks underpinning most professional archaeology has sat with MHCLG, while heritage policy has remained with DCMS. Archaeology’s cultural identity therefore sits with one department while its operational reality sits with another. The result is a profession that behaves culturally like heritage work, but is administered economically as part of the development process.
That distinction has consequences. Our position, sitting between two worlds but belonging fully to neither, means we fall between the cracks of the protective scaffolding built for both. We believe that resolving that dissonance is where everything else begins.
Preparing for the event meant mapping the Class Ceiling findings across years of archaeology-sector evidence from BAJR, the State of the Archaeological Market surveys, Profiling the Profession, CIfA’s Qualitative Inequalities Research and the discussion itself. What emerged were five main points of convergence.
NB: full bibliography and links provided below.
This topic of low salaries has been discussed so loudly and so often and for so many years that it feels redundant to mention, however it is an important point of synergy with the Class Ceiling findings and tees up the rest of the class-based fault lines that crack their way through archaeology careers.
Both sectors structurally depend upon workers subsidising the profession through personal sacrifice. Poor pay is a class filter that operates before any question of talent, commitment, or qualification, especially where it requires people to absorb prolonged financial uncertainty, inevitably narrowing who is able to remain long enough to progress.
People rarely enter archaeology or the arts for financial reasons. Class Ceiling identifies this as the defining vulnerability of cultural work: the depth of attachment people feel to their work is the mechanism through which their labour is devalued. When someone loves what they do, they will tolerate conditions they would never accept in work they felt neutral about.
Class Ceiling responds from both directions: raising pay floors so passion is no longer a financial subsidy, and reforming procurement so contracts cannot be awarded on price alone without regard for the workforce conditions that price depends on.
Archaeology has something the arts and culture sector lacks: our work is mandated through planning law. A current reframing of the intrinsic power of this in Ireland moves from a sector welfare issue to national infrastructure delivery risk, which gives decision makers outside archaeology a reason to care. Procurement is the process that connects the issues discussed here to the policy frameworks that could change it, and we should be leaning much harder on the mechanisms already there to negotiate much, much better deals for ourselves.
Archaeology and the arts both rely heavily on university-led pathways, informal experience-building, and forms of social and cultural familiarity that are unevenly distributed across class backgrounds. Our apprenticeship infrastructure has expanded in recent years through initiatives such as HESCAPE and the Historic Environment Forum’s resilience work, however there is very low employer take up and the Level 7 has now been scrapped. The 8th May conversation highlighted how fragmented the landscape still feels to many people attempting to enter the profession.
Professional accreditation as a barrier also came up quite a bit. CIfA accreditation remains one of the clearest routes to progression within archaeology, and the Institute has introduced bursaries and reduced-fee support. The BAJR data and the May live chat both show that even subsidised fees are still out of reach for many practitioners, particularly those on short-term contracts.
Rethinking accreditation access at the bottom of the pay scale seems a very necessary step, perhaps exploring an entry tier designed to open a door to the progression pathway without requiring disposable income as a precondition. Professional accreditation cannot simultaneously be treated as essential to workforce quality and financed as a personal expense; the goal is not to devalue accreditation but to ensure the profession’s own system does not inadvertently replicate the class filter.
A recurring theme during the event was that archaeology and the arts do not simply struggle to attract people – we struggle to keep them.
This matters because many of UK archaeology’s most acute shortages sit in specialist areas (artefact conservation, ecofact analysis, finds specialisms) requiring years-long periods of mentored development. When experienced practitioners leave mid-career, the knowledge loss is almost impossible to replace.
Ireland again offers an important example of where these pressures lead if left unresolved. Following the post-2008 collapse of the Irish construction sector, large numbers of archaeologists permanently left the profession. The workforce never fully recovered, and as development pressure has returned, employers, unions, universities, and professional bodies have jointly argued that the sector can no longer recruit or retain enough archaeologists under existing conditions. In 2026, that coalition formally asked the Labour Court to examine terms and conditions across commercial archaeology with a view to establishing a binding Sectoral Employment Order covering pay and protections.
The Irish conversation around archaeology and Sectoral Employment Orders became especially interesting in this context because it reframed workforce conditions not simply as an internal sector issue, but as a problem of delivery capacity. If archaeology is essential to unlocking housing and infrastructure pipelines, then pitching poor pay and conditions as a national infrastructure risk rather than a welfare problem frames the sustainability of the archaeological workforce as a matter of national resilience rather than a niche internal professional concern.
Short-term contracts, project-based employment, interrupted continuity, and reliance on informal professional networks appeared repeatedly both in Class Ceiling and in the archaeology discussion. Importantly, the event also highlighted that employers themselves are often navigating short procurement cycles, unpredictable development pipelines, and unstable commissioning environments.
This was one of the reasons shared apprenticeship and employment models (organisations pooling resources to create stable posts distributed across multiple employers or projects) generated so much interest during the discussion. These models help because they can stabilise some of the fragmentation rather than leaving individual workers to continually absorb the risk.
We also believe exploring portable benefits is essential. Getting serious about models that let workers carry pension, holiday, and continuity across employers would absolutely help with retention. The fired-and-rehired cycle is a class filter because only people with wealth reserves can tolerate the risks.
The most useful aspect of Class Ceiling was the attempt to move from diagnosis into coordinated response. Several ideas from the discussion felt particularly transferable:
First, archaeology needs better socio-economic data. The sector measures many aspects of workforce diversity, but class background remains far less visible than it should be. The common objection is that class is hard to define, however existing government definitions based on parental occupation are already in use across the public sector.
Second, procurement is the most underused structural tool the sector has. What would it take to make social value clauses carry enforceable weight in archaeological commissions? And to extend this to the workforce as much as the communities we work in? Archaeology sits inside planning and infrastructure systems already shaped by social value frameworks. The question is whether workforce sustainability and access can become part of those conversations in a more explicit way.
Third, archaeology would benefit from connecting deliberately with wider cultural-sector conversations around class, participation, and cultural labour. The arts sector is far from having solved these problems, but it has built networks, language, advocacy structures, and practical experiments archaeology could learn from rather than reinventing. Seeking membership or sector dialogue in Museum as Muck, the SMC creative industries working groups, and Jerwood’s network for example would help with archaeology’s inclusion in arts and culture sector data and advocacy.
A big question remains here for us: does archaeology want to be recognised as cultural work? What does the sector gain, and what does it risk, by stepping out of the construction-services framing it has spent decades adapting to? Is there a version of this that recovers the cultural identity we have stepped away from?
The contribution of the Class Ceiling conversation was not to replace the existing efforts in archaeology to address workforce sustainability, inclusion, skills, and resilience, but to connect some of it differently and to ask whether we have been looking at parts of the problem separately – recruitment, retention, burnout, unstable progression, shrinking specialist capacity, dependence on private subsidy – that now seem less like isolated workforce problems and more like symptoms of our position caught between cultural and commercial identities.
DV is not the right organisation to lead sector-wide reform, but we are well placed to bring together the many sources we have access to in order to clarify the issue and join it up to practice outside archaeology, test solutions through our own practice, and keep the conversation visible through events like DV Trends.
This paper is designed as an invitation to continue the conversation, and overtaken by better evidence, better proposals, and wider coalitions than we have assembled so far.
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