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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday, I received good news. The property owner of the Erma Hayman House in Boise, Idaho has given permission to conduct an archaeology project on this property. This will be the next step in my dissertation work on The River Street Digital History Project, but it is also an excellent […]
I wonder how many hours I’ve spent being a cultural resource management archaeologist. It’s hard to calculate because, even though I’ve been doing CRM since 2004, I haven’t always been employed full-time as a CRMer. In fact, based on the longest stints I’ve had with CRM companies, I think it’s […]
Archaeological Monitoring (v.) (1) watching and waiting for a mechanical excavator to reveal an archaeological deposit; (2) a great way for archaeologists to find sites and Native people to reclaim their heritage before development destroys all traces; (3) something construction companies and developers (should) know about but always seem to […]
