An Interview with Paul Everill

PE: When I first started as an undergraduate it was less than a year after PPG16 had come in, and I remember being taught a little bit about it. It was still a bit of an unknown quantity, but there was still a tendency for people to see it negatively that archaeology was being thrust into this commercial market place and that it wasn’t the best place for archaeology to be as a discipline. The focus was very much on the negatives; the downsides of that approach. I was only an undergraduate student, so my involvement in archaeology was very limited, but I think subsequently and certainly post-PPG16 everyone now is quite rightly looking back at that as a Golden Age, actually, in terms of the protection of the resource. There’s a rather different take on the PPG16 years. On the other hand, I still think there are issues with the discipline working within a commercial setting, I think a lot of people would have that problem with it. I guess that’s really the main change in the discipline in the time I’ve been involved with it. Obviously there are technological advances and changes in terms of methodology or approaches to sites, but that’s just kind of the evolution of how we do what we do. I think, really, the big disciplinary shift has been post-1990 and the introduction of PPG16.