I started my career as a cultural resource management archaeologist in 2004 when I was a graduate student at the University of Idaho. My supervisor, Robert Lee Sappington, was an old-time archaeologist who found ways to get students paid to go into the field. In fact, the University of Idaho has a long history of providing field experiences for anthropology students because it frequently lands contracts with local Native American tribes and state agencies, including those that need archaeological compliance with state and federal regulations.
I couldn’t have known at the time but this first paid position as an archaeological technician for the Idaho Transportation Department would send me on a lifetime of exploration and adventure in far-flung parts of the United States.
On that project, I worked 10-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays doing Class III data recovery excavations on the Clearwater River in Nez Perce County. We started work in January and the project ended around September; although, I took an 8-week hiatus in the summer to do other fieldwork in Illinois at what is now the New Philadelphia National Historic Site that would be the source of my master’s thesis. During the week I worked as a teaching assistant in the anthropology department but on weekends I pursued the job I’d always dreamed of.
I learned a lot from that dig. In the winter, we used plastic “longhouses” to thaw the ground and keep it from getting covered in snow. As the excavation got deeper, we used pneumatic shoring to hold up the sidewalls. When the weather was nice, we camped at a campground near the site. I learned how to keep charcoal samples from getting contaminated, how to identify different lithic materials, how to package projectile points and scrapers so they would remain pure enough to yield fruitful results from residue studies. It snowed. It froze. It rained. It was over 100 degrees some days. We worked through all of it. I had a blast.
Of course, every day was not paradise. There was drama between crewmembers and the toll it takes on your life when you’re deployed on a field project for 9 months. My body got sore, then healed, then sore again. I didn’t love every second of it but, as is the case with every project I’ve ever been on, archaeology is the only job I don’t want to quit the very first day I arrive.
Being an archaeologist is the realization of a dream.
Years ago, I attended a workshop at an archaeology conference taught by Carol Ellick and Joe Watkins that was designed for early career archaeologists. In the workshop, the instructors had attendees write on a white board how old they were when they decided they wanted to become an archaeologist. The ages ranged from elementary school into college-age. I knew I wanted to do this when I was in kindergarten.
Next, we were instructed to write the age we were when we got our first opportunity to do archaeology. A couple folks volunteered on a project when they were in high school but most of us got our start in college. It was sobering to realize that this whole room of archaeologists had to wait years, even more than a decade before we got our first chance to do the thing, we all thought we wanted to do for a living. What kept all of us going for so long?
I can’t answer for the rest of you but it was just sheer desire that kept me going all those years. I simply wanted to do archaeology. I just wanted it. I can’t figure out why I had this desire, but I just did. Archaeology was my dream job. And I achieved it as an undergraduate taking my first archaeological field school in 1999, 16 years after I told my parents I wanted to become an archaeologist when I grew up. Five years later, I’d made archaeology one of my jobs. By 2009, I had almost five years of gainful employment in the CRM industry.
I am living proof that there are complications with mixing your dreams with your employment. It transforms what was once an ideal, a motivator, into your livelihood. It goes from making no money to being your primary source of income, and that changes your relationship to your dream as well as your job. Sometimes the dream becomes tarnished by reality. It moves further away from something you want to do to something you have to do.
Achieving your dream by becoming a professional archaeologist is not for everyone but you will never know if archaeology is for you until you try it.
I am a firm believer in dreams. In your life, you will have more than one “career” (e.g. a job you hold for a significant period of your life that has upward mobility). Why not see if archaeology can be one of your careers?
Research interests keep archaeologists going.
Once you’ve achieved the dream, what keeps us archaeologists going? Again, this is going to vary between archaeologists but I feel like we all have a curiosity that motivates us to conduct research (e.g. a systematic investigation of a certain topic to yield new insights). There are things we want to know about human pasts so badly that we will dedicate hours, months, years of our lives towards finding out the answers.
I’ve done a lot of projects and I wasn’t 100% interested in every aspect of the things that made each site significant. However, there was always some kernel of human pasts that I wanted to know more about and this site gave me a chance to investigate it more deeply. I worked on sites associated with a lot of interesting histories:
- Women Mormon homesteaders in Pima County, Arizona
- Japanese American millworkers in Mukilteo, Washington
- The first town platted and subdivided by an African American in Pike County, Illinois
- A site in Pierce County where American soldiers prepared for chemical warfare on the Western Front of World War I
- A Spanish muleteer site in Greenlee County, Arizona
- Inventorying high altitude lead-silver mines in White Pine County, Nevada
- Chinese American shrimper’s settlement in Contra Costa County, California
- An Afro-Caribbean slave village on the Island of St. Croix in the U.S.V.I.
- Patayan sites on the Barry Goldwater Range in southern Arizona
- Hohokam sites in Tucson, Arizona
- The buried remains of Seattle near Lumen Field, home of the Seahawks
- Archaic Blackfeet sites in Glacier National Park, Montana
The list could go on for a while. My emphasis in graduate school was historical archaeology, nonetheless I found myself on all these different sites. Each one required me to learn something new about human pasts. In the process, I found something I could really get into on each one of these.
I think the opportunity to learn about what it meant to be human in the past and how there are so many things that relate to our current condition is a major motivation for us to stay in archaeology. Even after we’ve transitioned to new careers, we still bring this curiosity with us for the rest of our lives.
Archaeology is not easy.
Making it this far in archaeology was not easy; however, that is the case with most career fields. No career is easy. It is never easy to devote years of yourself towards anything. Archaeology is no different, despite the fact that many will lead you to believe there are “easy” careers in this world.
I’ve also been around long enough to learn that archaeology is not for everyone. Very few of the dozens of field school students I’ve taught went into archaeology. Most discovered in college that archaeology was not for them; many of the rest start working in archaeology before they come to that reality. Either way, it is true that most archaeology aspirants do not turn this into their career.
Nevertheless, this country needs archaeologists. Cultural resource management is rooted in the historic preservation and heritage conservation laws that place the identification, administration, and acknowledgement of archaeology as a right for every U.S. Citizen. It is also the government’s job to mitigate any adverse effects to archaeological resources. Until these laws change, the country will need professional archaeologists to help the government and this country’s citizens fulfill these obligations.
CRM archaeologists have a lot of power.
These regulations place CRM archaeologists in a very unique position when compared to practitioners of other fields. Archaeological resources are fragile. There is no way to repair adverse effects to archaeological sites. Similarly, every archaeological excavation causes damage to the very same fragile resources archaeologists hope will illuminate a small corner of human pasts. We hurt the very thing we love when we do archaeology. All of this means the country’s few CRM archaeologists have a lot of power over irreplaceable heritage resources.
We think there are between 11,000 and 18,000 archaeologists in the United States, which means, at most, 0.0053% of Americans are archaeologists. Nobody knows exactly how many archaeological sites exist in the United States. This is partially because we’re still finding more every day but also because many of the State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) do not make those numbers available (probably because their databases cannot calculate them). Therefore, there is no place where we can go to calculate how many archaeological sites exist in this country. Regardless of how many sites there are, it is professional archaeologists, for better or worse, who have chosen to take up the task of identifying sites and helping our society and its organizations mitigate human-induced adverse effects we may cause to those sites.
This is a very tall order. It is magnified even more given the fact that these sites relate to so many different cultures, ethnicities, and peoples while archaeologists do not reflect our country’s diverse demographics. We archaeologists do our best to fulfill our society’s commitment to itself regarding archaeological sites, but I’m sure you can understand that it will take more than just a few thousand archaeologists to keep sites safe and convey their relevance. Archaeologists are just one part of our entire society’s commitment to remember the past, but cultural resource management archaeologists play a very important role because they are the professionals who are paid specifically for this purpose.
We are all fortunate that today’s archaeologists are dedicated to their work. Archaeologists are among the few workers in our society who dreamed of doing their job years before they got the chance to actually do it. It is this dedication that keeps us going through the ups and downs of the cultural resource management archaeology economy. While this dedication does not always do us justice, it shines through when you hear us talk about the adventures we’ve had and discoveries we’ve made. It’s not enjoyable all the time, but archaeology is definitely fun. I won’t do this job forever, but it’s been a hell of a run so far. I bet it’ll be the same for archaeologists in the future too.
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