A few personal details: I was born in Bath in 1952 and spent my first 17 years in a small town called Keynsham, in between Bristol and Bath. The town achieved mild fame in the late 1960's through a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band LP and, earlier, for a chap called Horace Batchelor who used to advertise his sure-fire method of winning the pools (the infra-draw method) on Radio Luxembourg where he would spell out the name K E Y N S H A M when giving out his address.
Interestingly (or not, perhaps) my old school, Keynsham Grammar (which ceased to exist as a Grammar School shortly after I left it) now has a Website.
I went to Southampton University in 1970 to study archaeology with Professor Barry Cunliffe, who promptly left to go to Oxford (and is now, amongst many other things, General Editor of Internet Archaeology, whose Managing Editor I was from 1995 to 1999). Peter Addyman was also there for my first year before he too went on to better things, in his case to found York Archaeological Trust and do his bit towards inventing the Heritage industry (for good or ill).
I must have liked Southampton, since I spent the next eight years there until in 1979 I started work as Urban Archaeologist with the Berkshire Archaeology Unit, which promptly got swallowed up by the Trust for Wessex Archaeology.
I then moved to London, to work with the Department of Urban Archaeology in the Museum of London. The Museum is, I am happy to say, still around, having escaped my jinx. However, the Department of Urban Archaeology is no more, being amalgamated with the Department of Greater London Archaeology to form MoLAS (the Museum of London Archaeology Service).
In 1988 I moved from London to Lincoln to work for the Trust for Lincolnshire Archaeology. After a month this too underwent a major upheaval, out of which the City of Lincoln Archaeology Unit was born. I worked at Lincoln for eight years and in 1995 took up a part-time post at the Department of Archaeology at the University of York (which, so far as I know, is in no danger of folding).
I founded my business in 1997 and worked part-time for York and part-time for the consultancy until, in 1999, I realised that I had more consultancy work that could be handled part-time. Since then, the business has gone from strength to strength and we have a constant stream of archaeological finds flowing through the office, mostly from the England but also from further afield (e.g. ceramics from Madagascar and Taiwan, both 2004 projects).
© Alan Vince 1999, 2005