In my experience, most cultural resource management companies do not like to hire new employees. New hires take time to get up to speed. A CRM archaeology PI once told me it takes 18 months to two years just to get a new field tech, crew chief, or principal investigator […]
My wife isn’t an archaeologist but she is a hiring manager. She uses the same processes to hire new employees as nearly every archaeology company (except her job doesn’t use the hidden job market as liberally as the cultural resource management archaeology industry does). Her department has some entry-level positions […]
The River Street Archaeology Project ended earlier this month. It was a bittersweet moment for me because: I was working in my home town I worked with friends, acquaintances, and family that I love dearly There were excellent volunteers I got to actually direct a field school, and The project […]
Last week, I witnessed my third #dayofarch and was pleasantly surprised to see the prominence of blog posts about a number of great cultural resource management archaeology projects happening around the globe. For those of you who do not know, the Day of Archaeology I’m talking about was launched in […]
I once heard a story about paper and archaeology that I will never forget. A close friend told me that she once worked at an emergency data recovery project in Arizona where a prehistoric village had just been inadvertently discovered. The excavations included the meticulous removal of a significant number […]
I’ve heard most of the arguments against going paperless in cultural resource management archaeology and I can tell you the risks far outweigh the benefits: Doesn’t it take more time to record sites using tablets? What if the technology fails? What if we break our tablet/laptop in the field? It’s […]
For a person who is building a career based on the study of human beings, I have to confess: I really don’t like other people. The main problem with other people is they aren’t me. They have their own lives, thoughts, experiences, and perspectives that differ with the way I […]
Some people drive cars festooned with bumper stickers. It seems like, in the West, more than half of the cars and trucks traveling our roads have at least one. A few of us have covered our cars in them. Regardless of how many you have, bumper stickers seek to express […]
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 […]
