4.2 The Monuments Protection Programme
Sustainable management of the resource (2 of 2)
The sustainability discussion paper received a very warm welcome, in this country and further afield. Its ideas have rapidly taken root in many areas of conservation, including conservation plans and the continuing development of Sites and Monuments Records. It formed the basis of English Heritage's response to Opportunities for change, the government consultation process for formulating a new UK Strategy for Sustainable Development.
Scheduled monuments frequently contain several separate archaeological items (or sites), and it is these which most closely relate to Sites and Monument Record structures. On average there are two archaeological items to each Scheduled Monument, although many, especially in upland areas, have dozens, each of which needs separate identification and description within a scheduling proposal. The ratio is rising as more complex monuments and large areas (eg on Dartmoor and in Cumbria) are tackled by the Monuments Protection Programme. We have thus started measuring progress in numbers of Archaeological Items as well as in Scheduled Monuments: the Schedule at the end of 1997 98 contained c 28,500 items within its 17,483 Scheduled Monument entries.
Evaluating the resource
Scheduling proceeds on the basis of short-lists of sites drawn from strategic thematic evaluation of the whole resource. The first tranche of evaluations in the early 1990s used the Monument Class Descriptions and Sites and Monuments Record data on a county by county basis as their starting point. More recent evaluations have been national or based on the familiar steps of scoping/characterisation, site assessment, and evaluation that are used for industrial archaeology, for example for the coal and lead industries, and most recently for tin and copper mining. These approaches need to be applied to those (often large) parts of the archaeological resource where current knowledge and Sites and Monuments Record coverage is too weak to allow consistent national evaluation. 1997 98 was a turning point in this mammoth task: evaluation is complete or in hand for the majority of industries that have a major archaeological as opposed to architectural dimension, on medieval settlement and field systems (Archaeology Review 1996 97), Iron Age or Romano-British rural settlement, and twentieth (and nineteenth) century defence up to and including the Cold War. Some of this work is reported elsewhere in this Review, or in previous issues.
Dissemination and participation
Plans for greater dissemination of the information produced by the Monuments Protection Programme are also moving forward. A suite of leaflets now exists (Guide for owners of scheduled monuments: introduction to the MPP, MPP 1986 96), evaluation reports are routinely deposited in public repositories (notably Sites and Monuments Records and the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England [RCHME]), and the Monument Class Descriptions are available on the Internet. More substantially, publications are in preparation on the Medieval settlement atlas (Roberts and Wrathmell), on linear boundaries as a pilot volume to determine how to use Monument Class Description data to produce archaeological and conservation syntheses (Vyner), and on twentieth-century defence archive work (Dobinson).
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A less formal method of dissemination but probably more effective at professional level within the planning and conservation world is the bringing into partnership with the Monuments Protection Programme of a wider spectrum of the archaeological profession. We routinely commission local authority archaeologists, consultants, and commercial organisations to carry out assessment and evaluation projects and scheduling programmes to our specifications. The RCHME for example has been working for us on a survival-survey of World War II defence sites identified by our archive project, and has written a new Monument Class Description on earthwork gardens. There is thus a widening network of understanding and experience of our aims and work, to support our own small team of four English Heritage inspectors and eighteen Monuments Protection Programme archaeologists.
