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 THREE
Archaeology as Career or Avocation
A lasting interest in archaeology can be stimulated in many
ways—by reading a book, by visiting a museum, or by seeing
an ancient site. Any of these can arouse that strong curiosity
that is so fundamental to the archaeologist's makeup—and
to the human mind in general—that it is often taken for
granted. It is this curiosity, continually reinforced by
academic studies and later by one's own research, that molds and
sustains the true archaeologist.
Elementary school student participating in an
archaeological education program.
Some high schools have incorporated basic programs in
anthropology into their curricula, and a growing number of
middle and elementary school teachers are using archaeological
information and teaching materials in science, history,
geography, mathematics, and other related subjects. Educational
programs incorporating archaeology into the standard school
curricula now exist in Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Utah,
and a number of other states. If a student develops more than a
casual interest in the subject before going to college, there
are ample opportunities for expanding that interest.
There is no substitute for continued reading about archaeology;
most libraries have excellent and exciting books and magazines
about the field. A scrap-book of newspaper and magazine
clippings about new discoveries might be kept, for
archaeologists' finds are constantly outracing the history
books. More and more television programs on archaeological
topics are appearing, and they appeal to viewers of all ages.
Some of these, plus listings of selected books and magazines,
appear at the end of this booklet.
Public archaeology at Salishan Mesa, a Washington State
Centennial Celebration sponsored by the Bureau of
Reclamation.
In the United States, each state has at least one archaeological
society. Though they vary in what they are able to offer their
members, all afford chances to talk with others interested in
the study of the past or to visit local archaeological sites.
Often such societies and their branch chapters feature lectures
by professional as well as avocational archaeologists or
exhibits of archaeological materials related to the area. Also,
a visit to a large university can be interesting. There one can
see how archaeologists work in the laboratory, process and
catalog artifacts, make site maps, and prepare reports on their
excavations.
There are many chances to visit archaeological sites or
excavations and even to participate in professionally supervised
archaeological activities. About 400 archaeological sites or
museums in the United States and Canada are listed in two
excellent compendia: America's Ancient Treasures
(fourth edition) by Franklin Folsom and Mary Eiting Folsom
(University of New Mexico Press, 1993) and Exploring Ancient
Native America: An Archaeological Guide by David Hurst
Thomas (MacMillan, 1994). For those who would like to
participate in properly supervised and organized archaeological
studies, there are an increasing number of opportunities. Each
year the magazine Archaeology publishes a guide to
excavations in the Americas that can be visited or at which
individuals can work. Recent guides list nearly 60 projects in
over half the states with additional entries for Canada, Central
and South America, and the Caribbean. A similar listing is
published by the same magazine for excavations in Africa, Asia,
Europe, and the Pacific.
A number of educational and scientific organizations enable
individuals to participate in archaeological investigations.
Some, such as the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez,
Colorado, or the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville,
Illinois, sponsor research projects themselves. Some federal and
state agencies provide similar opportunities, such as the U.S.
Forest Service's "Passport in Time" program. Other
organizations—for example, the University Research
Expeditions Program and the Foundation for Field Research in
California, or Earthwatch in Massachusetts—place people in
research projects organized by archaeologists who work for
museums, universities, or public agencies. Most of these
organizations charge for their services, and the archaeological
programs require at least a one-week commitment. Most
participants are volunteers and pay for their own travel, room,
and board. The appendix in this publication provides additional
information about some of these programs.
It sometimes is possible for individuals to participate in
archaeology without leaving their community. More and more
state, county, and local governments have archaeology programs
that use substantial numbers of dedicated volunteers. In the
Washington, D.C., area, for instance, more than a dozen such
programs exist. The cities of Alexandria, Virginia, and
Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland, have very active programs in
volunteer archaeology, as do Fairfax County, Virginia, and
Prince Georges County, Maryland. Several other public and
private organizations offer similar programs.
A typical archaeological site in the midst of an
excavation.
In some parts of the country, local units of federal agencies,
such as the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of
Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Service,
and the National Park Service, offer chances to visit
excavations or participate in investigations in some way. Some
states also offer archaeological programs in museums,
historic-preservation offices, historical societies, or state
archaeologists' offices. In addition, universities and colleges
are opening archaeological field schools to nonstudents in
response to growing demands for continuing education programs.
Intensive academic training in archaeology begins in college.
Anyone wishing to specialize in archaeology customarily earns an
academic degree in anthropology. Most colleges have a separate
department of anthropology, some a combined
department—most often with sociology. Others have an
office of social studies or social sciences. A few schools have
a separate department of archaeology.
Archaeology also is used extensively to study ancient history,
especially in places like Egypt, Greece, and Italy, so classics
departments regularly include archaeological training among
their offerings. More and more American studies programs also
include historical archaeology in the curriculum.
Undergraduate catalogs available from each college or university
give all the necessary requirements for the completion of a
degree. Required courses often include introductory anthropology
and broad general survey courses in physical anthropology and
linguistics. Courses dealing with archaeology or cultural
anthropology are usually oriented to specific areas of the world
such as North America or Africa or to certain categories of
human behavior such as social organization or religion. In
addition, the study of closely related subjects such as history,
geology, and statistics is essential to the program.
In the long run, a bachelor's degree alone is not enough for a
career in archaeology. As is the case in most fields of science
today, a complete program of graduate study is necessary if one
is to enjoy all the benefits of archaeology as a lifelong
venture. In the United States and Canada more than 500 colleges
and universities offer a master's degree in anthropology; about
100 of these offer programs that lead to a doctor's degree.
Choice of the "right" school depends on many factors. Some are
entirely personal; others are dictated by the special areas of
interest of the prospective student or by matters of tuition
cost and ease of admission. Some students may prefer the
relatively relaxed informality of a small department, others the
opportunities and demands of a large faculty and numerous
graduate students. Each situation has special advantages and
disadvantages. At any rate, you should choose a school that
emphasizes those particular subjects or areas within archaeology
that generally match your own interests. Although retirements
and faculty replacements might change the emphasis of a
particular department, such changes are most often gradual
rather than sudden. Whatever you decide, it is helpful to
remember that, in general, the school is not as important as the
student. If you are interested and enthusiastic about your
chosen career and possess a normal degree of intelligence and
scientific bent, your chances of success are excellent in either
a small or a large school.
Archaeologists excavating at the Samuel Lemon house.
For graduate studies it is not essential to have an
undergraduate degree, or major, in anthropology. The student who
does not have such a degree often must take extra courses to
attain a general background knowledge of the subject, but
because of the great scope of archaeology, a background in
almost any discipline will turn out to be useful.
Requirements concerning courses and credits vary from school to
school, and so does the nature of courses offered. In small
departments it is often impossible to find a full range of
courses that are offered to either graduates or undergraduates
exclusively. In mixed classes, graduates are usually required to
do some extra project—a term paper or oral presentation.
Larger departments, naturally, have many advanced, specialized
courses, such as Maya hieroglyphic writing, dating methods, or
the entry of the first people into the Americas, for graduate
students alone. These courses are usually organized as seminars
in which a very limited number of students freely discuss the
subject and exchange ideas on matters that arise during the
professor's presentation.
Because of the complexity of the scientific study of ancient
cultures, archaeologists will sooner or later find a need for
many courses outside archaeology itself. These include geology,
paleontology, botany, zoology, and statistics and may indeed
range from sciences such as physics or chemistry to humanities
such as general history or art history. Courses in basic
writing, word processing, computer graphics, and desktop
publishing also will help in producing research papers and field
reports.
An archaeologist uses a special camera for use
underwater.
Most master's programs require at least a reading knowledge of
one language other than the student's own. The choice of
languages, like choice of curriculum, depends largely on one's
future research plans. For those specializing in the archaeology
of eastern Canada, for example, French would seem a logical
choice since many primary sources relating to the history and
culture of that area, as well as many archaeological reports,
appear in that language. Someone planning future research in
Guatemala or Peru would choose Spanish for corresponding
reasons.
Whatever the choices to be made and followed through graduate
school, the end comes, usually after an average of seven and a
half years, in the form of examinations and a doctoral
dissertation. Examinations, which may be oral or written, test
the student's general knowledge of both anthropology and
archaeology, and his or her areas of specialty in particular.
The dissertation is normally a book-length document based on
original research. It is designed to demonstrate the student's
ability to pursue scientific inquiry by taking a certain
problem, chosen by the student with help from faculty advisers,
and solving it logically. In archaeology this often involves
field research or analysis of archaeological materials.
Academic study is only part of the essential training of
archaeologists. They also must study in the field. Because site
conditions vary so greatly, students in the field confront an
exciting and often unpredictable world of surprises. For this
reason, fieldwork can be discussed only in the most general
terms. Actual excavation during any one school session can never
provide an accurate picture of what the scientific excavation of
any other ancient site will be like. What should be learned are
the general principles of field research—matters of
sampling and recording and the practical aspects of the
character and the direction of excavation.
Students participating in James Madison University's
Field School.
Many large universities operate their own field projects at a
single place where excavation is continued over many
seasons—usually in summer in the United States and Canada,
in the fall-winter dry season in Mexico and Central America, in
the December-to-March summer south of the Equator. Projects of
this kind are customarily open only to undergraduate and
graduate students of the university involved. Many institutions,
though, provide training for large numbers of graduates,
undergraduates, and occasionally high school students, who are
accepted from all over the United States. Such field schools
usually provide academic credit. Other field schools are
operated almost like business enterprises, where interested
persons pay a fee in return for firsthand excavation experience.
Still others—less field schools than actual research
projects—may be run by a particular faculty member who
hires and pays a select crew of student laborers or local people
for the work.
The variety among field schools is enormous, as the numerous
notices that appear each year on the bulletin boards of
anthropology departments attest. Together they cover not only
virtually every area of the Americas but often Europe and the
Middle East as well. The Archaeological Institute of America in
Boston, Massachusetts, annually publishes a listing of field
schools and excavation programs that need volunteer help.
Many archaeological societies also conduct field sessions
involving excavation, as well as workshops and other events on
various aspects of archaeology. They are generally run by or
involve professionals and trained avocational archaeologists and
are open to society members or to the public.
A student at the University of Maryland takes notes as
she excavates.
There is no substitute for the supervised introduction to actual
excavation that training at a field school, however large or
small, provides. Here the participant learns not only how to
record accurately all data uncovered in the process of digging
but also things such as how to recognize subtle changes in soil
cross sections and stains that may be important in the final
interpretation of what happened at the site. Training may range
from exhausting spells with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow to
delicate, methodical trowel work; and from chemical preservation
of perishable artifacts of wood or cloth to the systematic
cataloging of these objects—sometimes hundreds of
thousands of them.
In a field school, students get some hint of the everyday
demands of practical archaeology, learning that excavations in
remote areas often demand unusual skills. Professional
archaeologists may need the patience and psychological insight
of a good submarine commander; they must at times perform as an
imaginative innovator in auto mechanics, photography, art,
surveying, engineering, and first aid. Archaeologists must also
be well versed in public relations and the solving of personnel
and personal problems.
As a unit is excavated a profile becomes visible.
With time and training there comes a sort of attitude or outlook
that sets archaeologists apart. They are continuously aware of
the importance of the structured interplay between observation
and explanation—and of the fundamental aim of archaeology
to interpret the relationship of material culture to human
behavior. Because of this, archaeologists are able to profitably
study subjects like art motifs on colonial New England
gravestones or present-day trash heaps in a small Guatemalan
town. At first glance these might appear far from the realm of
"true" archaeology, but not so, since each in its way permitss
cientists to probe more deeply the relations between material
things and human ways of the past and to relate these
meaningfully to the present.
Prior to the 1970s most of the available jobs in archaeology
were in universities, some were in junior colleges, and a few
were in museums and other research institutions. A 1994 survey
of members of the Society for American Archaeology suggests a
more diversely employed profession at the present time. Among
the 1,673 members sampled, about 38 percent were employed in
colleges and universities, about 10 percent in museums, 18
percent in government agencies, and another 24 percent in
private firms.
Most archaeologists in academic jobs teach and usually also
devote time to research, including fieldwork. The questions of
advancement, fringe benefits, and salary are, of course, in the
control of institutions, and these vary greatly. There are
several status levels, each with a salary range tied to
experience, productivity, and length of time in a position.
Starting salaries currently range, for one just having completed
the doctorate, upward from around $35,000 a year. Salary depends
upon the individual's previous experience and the needs and
ability of the hiring institution. Normally at a college or
university one starts out as an assistant professor or, very
rarely, as an associate professor. Advancement to full professor
comes with time—paced by quality of work and frequency of
publication.
Employment by a museum as a curator entails responsibility for
maintaining, exhibiting, and doing research on the museum's
archaeological collections. Frequently archaeologists become
involved in other aspects of museum administration.
In addition, federal and state agencies increasingly employ
archaeologists to assist them in managing the archaeological
resources under their jurisdiction or affected by their
programs. Indeed, this concept of the intelligent and effective
management of archaeological resources, both before and after
discovery and excavation, has become a concern of all
archaeologists.
Archaeological investigations required for public projects or on
public lands often are carried out by archaeologists employed in
private sector consulting firms. These private sector
archaeologists work closely with those employed by public
agencies to insure that investigations are appropriate and that
the care of records and archaeological collections is adequate.
Many prospective archaeologists worry about their potential
contribution to the field of knowledge. They need not, for the
options are many, and in the course of time most people tend to
follow their own interests and inclinations wherever they lead.
Some archaeologists are inclined toward the complex intellectual
manipulation of theoretical approaches to problems that may
include artifact typology, studies of symbolism, subsistence,
economics, or population dynamics. Others find their preferences
in comparatively new approaches such as computer analysis and
the application of systems theory to archaeological problems.
Many find their greatest satisfaction in fieldwork or in special
studies that include everything from ceramic technology to
ancient calendar systems. Most archaeologists end up
specializing in a geographic area, such as Mesoamerica or
Oceania; others may focus on a particular time period such as
the era of the Paleo-indians and their ancestors.
Because all these interests are important, there are almost as
many ways to be a productive archaeologist as there are
individual archaeologists. Indeed, this is probably what gives
the profession some of its great appeal, for archaeology remains
above all a subject that allows anyone with the basic background
and the scholarly discipline to make a valuable contribution to
our knowledge of humanity.
To learn more about topics covered in Chapter 3, visit these
National Park Service Features:
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Federal Archeology Program:
Based on a National Strategy for Federal
Archeology, the program includes a wide range of
efforts to interpret the past for the public,
care for collections, conduct scientific
investigations, and protect archeological sites.
The Secretary of the Interior reports to
Congress each year on these activities through
this program.
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Southeast Archeological Center:
For over thirty years, the Southeast
Archeological Center (SEAC) has carried out a
tradition of archeological research, collections
and information management, and technical
support for national park units located in the
southeastern U.S. and beyond.
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National Park Service Archeology Career Guide:
Interested in a career in archaeology? Here is
some useful information to answer some questions
you may have and guide you in the right
direction.
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