The number one lie people believe about a career in archaeology 3

Every now and then, I hear from an aspiring archaeologist who is confused by the things they read on social media about the cultural resource management industry. The source of their confusion comes from the following conversation:

1)            Somebody says CRM archaeology sucks.

2)            Even though archaeology is their dream job, the aspiring archaeologist (who is usually still in college) starts second guessing their career choice.

3)            “Is it really that bad?” the aspiring archaeologist asks.

4)            Other CRMers increase the volume on their whining.

5)            The conversation crescendos into a cacophony of stories of hardship, financial distress, and how, even though archaeology ruined their lives, they wouldn’t change their decision.

6)            The aspiring archaeologist is even more confused than ever. Is archaeology a bad career choice or a good one? Will they also suffer the same pain and hardship, or even worse? WERE THEIR PARENTS RIGHT?!?!?!!

(FYI: As a parent, I know parents are always right. All the time. Every day… If you believe this then you’d better not go into archaeology.)

Why do folks think being an archaeologist should be easy?

This whole quandary revolves around an insidious lie somebody, somehow, somewhere thought up and has perpetuated to the rest of the world. The lie is: some career paths are easy and others are hard.

Who started this nonsense? All worthwhile career paths are hard. There is no easy way to a high-paying job where you have absolutely no chance of getting fired or laid off. Who ever heard of an industry where it is a breeze to get hired, the work is easy, and you get paid a lot of money?

And, who, for-the-love-of-God, thought that becoming an archaeologist would be easy?

I know what you’re thinking. “There are tons of easy jobs out there that pay a lot of money. Investment bankers, corporate CEOs, accountants, government bureaucrats. Hell, I should try and get one of those jobs because it’ll sure be better than digging shovel probes in the jungle of Georgia for minimum wage.”

Wrong. None of those jobs are easy to get, easy to keep, or easy to do. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN EASY CAREER.

Having a great career is a lot of hard work, half of which you’ll never get thanked for. This has always been the reality of being a human being. In work and life, there are no second place ribbons. There aren’t any first place ones either. The only reward we can expect is the satisfaction of knowing we followed our dreams, we’ve done the best we could, and held nothing back. This goes the same for any career.

Let me tell you a story

At a young age, my grandmother said, “Billy, you’re a smart boy. You have a lot of skills that can take you far, but you’d better never forget you’re black. If you want to be successful in life, you’re going to have to work twice as hard as other people just to get half the respect. If you don’t work harder than everybody else, you’re never going to get a good job, you’ll never get promotions, and you’ll never be acknowledged for anything you do.”

My grandmother was right, but she thought my life would be exceptionally hard simply because I was black. Born in rural North Carolina during the 1930s, she knew what she was talking about. Jim Crow wouldn’t let a black person move up in the world unless they were twice as skilled, twice as smart, and worked twice as hard. Our black elders didn’t want us to grow up without knowing the lessons they’d learned the hard way so they drilled it into our conscious at an early age.

I know a lot of other African Americans who were taught this same exact lesson by their elders, but it actually applies to everyone. Black people have long been aware the reality that it’s impossible to get a good job and have a fruitful career without a lot of hard work, but it seems like not everyone has gotten the message.

The workplace in the United States has always been competitive and this competition will only continue to get fiercer. I’ve witnessed competition in the job market get increasingly fierce in my short time as an archaeologist. Since I earned my BA in 2001:

• There were 285 million people living in the United States. Now there are 318.9 million.
• In 2001, about 26% of Americans 25 years or older had a bachelor’s degree. Today, 30% of Americans in that demographic have a bachelors—a whopping 61 million individuals.
• An estimated 2.8 million Americans graduated from college in the spring of 2015 alone.

The loss of jobs during the recession only made things harder for Gen-X and the Millennials. It’s hard to find a decent job and this joblessness can stunt our adulthood:

• The time period from 2009 to 2015 is the longest sustained period of high unemployment since World War II
• In 2014, 36 percent of women aged 18 to 34 still lived with their parents, the most since 1940.
• Nearly 43 percent of men in that demographic still live at home. By contrast, only a quarter of all 18-34—year-olds lived at home in 1960 when our parents and grandparents were starting out.

If competition is tough for the entire millennial generation, it’s even more difficult for archaeologists:

• As many as 400,000 anthropology degrees have been granted in the United States since 1920. Half of all of these degrees have been granted since 1992. And, that doesn’t even count the 91,000 archaeology degrees granted since 1920; half of which were also granted since 1996. (NOTE: Those estimates were made in 2011, so there are probably even more anthro and archaeo degrees floating around out there today).
• American universities grant approximately 8,300 anthro BAs, 1,100 MAs, and 440 PhDs each year.
• Contrast that with the estimated 11,030 archaeologists working in the United States and you can see how competitive a career in archaeology actually is.

Basically, the number of archaeologists in the United States represents only 2% of the total number of anthropology and archaeology degrees granted since 1920; or, 4.5% of the anthro and archaeo degrees granted since 1992.

Never tell me the odds

We can’t live our lives based solely by looking at the odds. If we simply crunched the numbers to make all of our career decisions, nobody in the United States would ever try to become an archaeologist. We all have a chance to achieve our dream job, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work no matter what job you want to do. Aspiring archaeologists have to work hard intellectually, physically, and dedicate a lot of effort towards growing their professional network.

Each of those 11,000 archaeologists working in the United States today was told exactly what every aspiring archaeologist is told: “DON’T DO IT. You’ll never make it. You can’t make money doing archaeology, so why try?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard somebody say, “You’re an archaeologist? I wanted to do that when I was a kid, but…..” The reasons for not pursuing the dream of becoming an archaeologist vary but they are almost always based on earning potential and a general lack of belief in one’s personal abilities:

“I didn’t think I could do it.”

“I heard archaeologist don’t get paid much.”

“I thought it would be too much work.”

Basically, “I thought it would be too hard.”

Archaeology is not the career for everybody. It is hard work. You don’t get paid a whole lot. Few people actually understand what we contribute to society. Nobody thanks us for what we do. You have to be passionate about what you do if you want to become an archaeologist. But, all the archaeologists alive today would still be sleeping on our parents’ couch if we let the horrible odds of success or the difficulty of the journey shape our decisions. You will never know what you could have been unless you apply yourself, go all in, and take a shot in the dark. That’s how all of the archaeologists working in the United States got where they’re at today.

Have you ever heard of Eric Thomas?

I hadn’t either until a couple of years ago. Now, I listen to his speeches every Monday for motivation.

In a nutshell, Eric Thomas was a knucklehead from Detroit. He wasn’t gifted with athletic talent or intellectual prowess. He wasn’t a good student. No male member of his family had graduated from high school in three generations. His father walked out on him when he was a young boy. He grew up in a single-parent household. As a teenager, Eric cut class and hung out with other kids who thought school was for suckers. Then he dropped out of high school and got kicked out of his home for not listening to his mother. So, as a young man, Thomas was living on the streets and eating out of garbage cans.

Being homeless sucked, so Thomas did something about it. He started taking classes and got his G.E.D. Then he decided to go on to college. Like I said before, ET was not a skilled student so it took him 12 years to get his bachelor’s degree. It took him 14 more years to finish his PhD at Michigan State.

How the hell did a high school dropout eating out of garbage cans with no father, no connections, no G.P.A, no support, and no home go on to earn a PhD? Hustle and perseverance. Thomas cultivated an indomitable work ethic. He decided that, even though he wasn’t the smartest, strongest, fastest richest, or best, he was still going to accomplish his goals whatever the cost. He knew he was going to have to work twice as hard and twice as long as everybody else. He knew this was going to be hard and the path would be long, but this didn’t keep him from moving forward.

Thomas started waking up at 5 AM as a college student so he could work a full-time job while also attending classes. Most of the night was spent studying, leaving Thomas with very few hours to sleep. Even though his life was hard, he refused to give up and completed his bachelors at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama in 2001. He kept up this grueling pace throughout his graduate studies. Today, he frequently talks about how he wakes up at 3AM and is working by 4 every day.

Eric Thomas has become a motivational speaker and guru to professional athletes and millionaires because of a YouTube video that went viral. In the early 2000s, Thomas decided he would help other teens who were living the life he had once lived. He created the Break the Cycle Program and started giving motivational speeches to teens across the country. One of Thomas’ friends recorded one of his speeches and posted it to YouTube. The video was barely watched for more than a year before it was discovered by some marketing executives who wanted to use his message in some of their commercials. One commercial turned into speaking events, consulting gigs, and book deals. Thomas started his own company in 2005. Today, he is a best-selling author and multi-millionaire who gives speeches to different audiences around the world.

ET is particularly famous for telling a story about a young entrepreneur who sought tips for success from an old guru who showed the young man he would only be successful when he wanted to succeed as much as he wanted to breathe. You can watch this parable in the first 2:30 of the video below:

Most aspiring archaeologists would rather sleep than achieve their goal

If you watched the video, you heard Thomas talk about what it takes to be successful. He also tells the truth about success; Most people only kinda want it. Most people would rather get some extra sleep than wake up early and start grinding toward their goals.

This is the real difference between the 11,000+ archaeologists in the United States and the 280,000 Americans who received a degree in anthropology or archaeology after 1992 but never achieved their dream of becoming an archaeologist. Those who ARE archaeologists were willing to forgo sleep, willing to work long hours, willing to risk their health, basically, willing to put in the work just to accomplish a goal. Those who wanted to become archaeologists but didn’t make it took the easy way out. They thought getting a business degree and sitting in a cubicle for 40 years was a safer bet than digging shovel probes. I wonder what they thought after getting laid off during the recession.

Being an archaeologist isn’t easy. No career path is. There is no painless pathway you can take to success. Being a cultural resource management archaeologist is a personal choice. CRMers choose to make the sacrifices necessary to have this career because it is our dream. We quit when the dream fades.

You don’t have to do archaeology until you drop just to be considered successful. Nothing says you have to put in 40+ years of work in order to be successful. If you’ve undergone years of study to get an anthro degree, sacrificed spare time to volunteer at a site or do a field school, and have ever gotten paid to do archaeology, you’ve achieved your goal. You actually became an archaeologist. You are successful. You did what most of the other 61 million Americans with a college degree didn’t do; you followed your dreams to fruition. The rest of your career is just icing on the cake.

It’s keeping that icing from melting off of the cake that frustrates most cultural resource management archaeologists. You can get the degree, get the job, and build the network, but its maintaining that whole thing that can turn into a grind. This is what most people who complain about being a CRMer are really talking about. They’re mainly frustrated at supporting a dream that didn’t turn out the way they thought it would. They are tired and disenchanted which is what prompts them to say what they do about the industry. I know because I’ve been there.

Whether you’re doing archaeology or something else, this same thing will happen no matter what career path you choose. You will wonder, “Why do I keep putting up with this?” “Does this matter to me anymore?” This is an unavoidable part of having any career and it’s the reason why retirement was created.

It’s harder to stay at the top than it is getting there. You will have to keep up the same hustle and persistence until you retire or die. This is a fact of life regardless of what career you choose. When the thrillin is gone, choose something else to do with your time.

The question is: Would you rather bust your ass to keep doing archaeology or bust it doing something else? If you’d rather bust ass doing archaeology, keep doing archaeology. If not, fold your hand.

I want to hear what you think. Please write a comment below or send me an email.

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