This is a summary of what I learned from my second year as an archaeology PhD student. Sometimes it feels like the world is falling down around us and the only light at the end of the tunnel comes from the opening where we entered this subterranean realm. Human beings […]
Time is money in cultural resource management archaeology. Sometimes, field archaeologists and GIS specialists have strained relationships within their CRM companies because field archaeos do not always know how to create maps using GIS software. We think the GIS people can just conjure a map from thin air in less […]
I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the @everyDIGsexism conversation on Twitter. The discussion highlights many of the problems women face in cultural resource management and academic archaeology. For forward-thinking intellectuals, a lot of male archaeologists and archaeology students should really be ashamed of themselves. I’ve been known to […]
Historic preservation-minded developer Bill Naito didn’t just save buildings. He helped create ambiance, character, and augmented the quality of life in downtown Portland, Oregon. During the 1960s, Naito saw potential in the rotting waterfront warehouses. He realized that remodeling these buildings may not immediately improve property values, increase foot traffic, […]
Don’t you just love it when you get a PDF of a project area floating in the middle of some unidentified terrain? Just a polygon overlain upon some barren desert, forest quadrat, or urban freeway with very little context? And, you’re, somehow, expected to plan your cultural resource management archaeology […]
“It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up.” Vince Lombardi It’s no secret most cultural resource management archaeologists give up. CRM is a hard field in which to build a career. Recently, I came across this post written in 2000 on the United Archaeological Field Technicians […]
Cultural resource management companies don’t need archaeologists. They don’t. Think about it. Is archaeology the ONLY thing CRM archaeologists do for their companies? Do companies need employees that ONLY do archaeology? The answer is no. CRM archaeologists do a wide variety of different activities and tasks for their employers. They […]
I have been lead author or primary contributor to over 60 cultural resource management archaeology reports. That’s not including reports where I wrote a historic background, artifact analysis, or boilerplate contribution. All of that writing represents dozens of man-hours and thousands of dollars’ worth of research. Those reports represent the […]
In the beginning, there are 64 teams. The NCAA selection committee ranks each team and creates four groups loosely based on regions of the country. Then, they play each other until only one remains. The NCAA mens basketball tournament, March Madness, begins with a spectacular flurry. Half of the teams […]
I was recently informed that a CRM archaeology technical report isn’t true archaeology writing. It was a shocking revelation that came from somebody that has written dozens of cultural resources reports that instantly made me start thinking about the nature of our industry and the way we value our reports, […]
