How hard can it be for the government to stop its Brexit dithering for a moment and remove the planning blight surrounding EU research funding (‘We haven’t got a plan B’: Academics race to safeguard research amid Brexit fears, 16 October)? Archaeology may deal in timescales of many thousands of years but the crisis looming in two years’ time threatens to sweep away our status as a world leader in deep history.
The value of our EU funding is not just monetary. In its explicit support for blue-skies research, it is a rare funding resource. It encourages archaeologists to explore the potential of cutting-edge technologies applied to new evidence from the field and museum archives, and all driven by original questions about who we are and where we came from.
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