Doing CRM Archaeology in your 30s and 40s 3

It took years to land my first full-time job in cultural resource management archaeology. It took an undergraduate degree, a Master’s, and many resumes, cover letters, and conference papers.

On my first CRM projects as a twentysomething, crew chiefs and project managers could clearly see my biggest asset—the fact that I was young, strong, and could dig. They set me to work. I dug holes of all shapes and sizes (Trying to figure out if a rodent burrow is a feature anyone?). I also felt strong and was excited to do the work. Northern Virginia, rural Illinois, northeastern Oklahoma, camping in north Idaho; it was all new. I was down to work wherever, whenever.

As I sit and write at 4:50AM on a Friday, sipping my morning coffee, I realize a lot has changed since then. I’m not going to tell you how old I am (ask me the next time you see me at a conference), but I can clearly say I no longer spring out of bed in the morning yearning to dig the next level in my excavation unit. A lot has changed since that first project.

What changes between the time when you start doing CRM in your 20s and the time when you reach the middle part of your career—your 30s and 40s? I can’t tell you exactly when it changed. All I can do is tell you some of the things that have changed over the years.

John Henry Fades

I still love to dig. The smell of freshly unearthed earth. The feeling of using your body to do something other than sit down. How your body works while you’re peeling back layers of sediment to unearth archaeological information. I still love everything that comes with digging. But, digging for too many hours makes my body feel different than it used to.

Now, digging makes my body hurt sometimes. When I first started out, I used to dig like I imagine John Henry laid railroad tracks: swiftly, with precision but with great strength. Powerful. I recall using an 8-lb. sledge hammer to break stones out of the foundation of a nineteenth century cellar. Another field tech and I wailed away at that foundation for a couple days—about 20 person-hours each. I also recall using a pickaxe to break through chip seal and compacted, gravelly sediments for a few 8-hour days. I can no longer recall how many shovel probes and excavation units I’ve dug (folks that know me would say I’ve dug at least 1).

Now, I’m like Dan Arnit. Most of the time I’d rather use a backhoe to dig until we find something worthy of using a shovel or trowel.

Going “John Henry” hurts now. Certain kinds of excavation hurt my body because I’m getting older. Shovel skimming is fine. Troweling is fine, but my knees can get cranky after lunch. Shovel probing and using the breaker bar is less good but doable. Pickaxe = Discomfort for a few days.

The legacy of that hard digging is also starting to catch up to me. My left elbow and knees are stiff in the morning. Sometimes my back is stiff too, although I think that’s related to sitting at a desk too much and too many years wearing a heavy pack in the field on survey. I can still dig and I can still put down the hammer in the field whenever necessary. I just need to take my vitamins (i.e. ibuprofen) first.

I sure am glad I don’t have to dig all the time anymore.

Benefits Matter

All those aches and pains help us realize our mortality. No archaeologist can stay in the field forever, regardless of how badly we want to. That morning stiffness you start feeling in your 30s and 40s makes you realize why health insurance was invented.

Any CRMer is interested in benefits like vacation, sick time, a retirement plan, and (importantly) health insurance those things become a necessity by your 30s. By that time, a job with no potential of benefits almost isn’t even worth applying for.

The hammering your body takes as a field archaeologist will catch up with you sooner or later. You will also start realizing that your time in the workforce is limited. Social security is one “retirement strategy,” but many of us would like to have some supplemental income in the form of an IRA or 401k (pensions are almost unattainable for archaeologists so those are our best options these days).

Unfortunately, providing benefits is getting harder and harder for cultural resources-only firms. The Affordable Care Act isn’t as good as company-provided health care. A 401k or IRA takes time to build. It is in our best interest to get health care as soon as we can and start amassing a retirement fund in our 20s. By the time an archaeologist hits her 30s, they are playing catch-up on retirement and can no longer afford to work without these basic benefits.

The inability to attain benefits is the second most common reason for attrition rates in CRM (lack of job stability is the most common reason). These two reasons were commonly given in the 2016 recording of the CRM Archaeology Podcast episode #12 (https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/crmarchpodcast/12?rq=episode%2012). CRMers leave the industry because they want the kind of job where they can get benefits and be fairly confident that they will have a job next month. These two factors become increasingly relevant as we age.

Doing Officework gets Boring

Archaeology is a dream job because you never know where it will take you, never know what you will find, and every day has the potential to be exciting….that is if you’re in the field. The same thing that forces CRM archaeologists into the office—fieldwork—is the same thing that keeps our work exciting. In your 30s and 40s, you are still mobile enough to go out into the field (just not all the time) and not sedentary enough to resign yourself to a “desk job.”

There are additional forces at play that keep a CRM archaeologist in the office; by your 30s you have enough experience to do office tasks and might cost too much to be sent out into the field. These realities create an increasingly powerful pull on each of us that will, eventually, keep us chained to a chair. This is when archaeology becomes less of a dream and more of a job—the transition that moves us away from the thrill of discovery and towards becoming one of “the Email People.”

The home front of CRM archaeology (i.e. the office) is a very important part of the entire industry. Officework is what keeps each company afloat. Contracts are won in the office. RFPs and research designs are created there. The office is where technical reports, research, and articles are produced. However, becoming acclimated to spending most of our time in the office is one of the hardest things for a field archaeologist to accept.

You get calm

This is the best thing about getting experience in CRM: You get calm enough to assess situations and use your experience to brainstorm and execute suitable responses. In the field, those of us in our 30s and 40s are the word of reason. We are also the ones empowered with making decisions that affect the course of the project. Younger techs and students listen to us because we’ve still got one foot in a steel-toed boot and another in a pair of Keen Austins (i.e. men’s dress Crocs).

There’s a difference between the knowledge and experience of a CRMer in their 30s/40s and the “I’ve-seen-and-done-everything,” knowitallism of a CRMer in their 50s and older. The mid-career CRMer still feels like they have a lot to learn; they’re still willing to listen and still pay attention to what is going on. Young techs either feel like they know everything or lack the confidence to show what they know. They’ve still got a long way to go. Older PIs feel like they already know everything because, back in ’82, they used to be in your shoes. Even though things in CRM are dramatically different than they were 30 years ago, older CRMers would rather tell you stuff than listen to you. This is why CRMers in their 30s and 40s are so pivotal. They’re starting to get calm and confident while still being open to change.

Cultivating that calmness that comes with experience is essential to this job because the alternative is panicked, knee-jerk reactions that lead to mistakes or milquetoast decisions made based on data from a bygone era. Your 30s and 40s are when you start to feel like you know what you’re doing. You are truly getting good at your job.

Some of us start to get jaded

Project after project. Site after site. Unit after unit. Hotel after hotel. It all starts to blend together. There’s a reason why older CRM PIs act like they’ve seen it all; it’s because a lot of what they’ve done has all blended together through the lens of time.

I’m not talking about when you’re actually doing data recovery. That’s never the same. There’s constantly the potential to find something during a data recovery. You never forget the interesting parts of those projects. I’m talking about the day-to-day execution of CRM: The field prep, digging shovel probes, filling out health and safety forms, cataloging artifacts, surveying across the desert, writing boilerplated reports, living out of a suitcase in a hotel somewhere, eating breakfast at a gas station, drinking that last beer so you can go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.

Ely, Nevada. Glendale, Arizona. Port Angeles, Washington. Santa Rosa, California. East Glacier, Montana. Medora, North Dakota. The towns and projects start to blend together. You can recall the highlights but, as the dream becomes a job, traveling to far-flung towns and surveying places in remote landscapes for the same type of projects starts to become normal. You start to forget the details in the mundane.

As you see more highlights, it also becomes more difficult for you to remember the spark that got you in this field in the first place. You can see the glimmer of surprise in a young tech’s eyes when they find something remarkable but that spark gets duller in your eyes because you’ve seen similar things before. Or, you’re on autopilot thinking about all the stuff you have to do to keep this project moving and keep your boss off your back. Or, you’re thinking about the husband and kids you left back home to be out in rural America with a shovel in your hands.

Even worse is how you’ve seen so many remarkable sites get demolished to make way for vanilla buildings and landscapes that won’t be worth recording in 100 years and add little to our current quality of life. The Hohokam village destroyed to make way for another outlet mall. The first homestead in the county demolished for another subdivision of uninspiring tract housing. The Archaic prehistoric site destroyed to expand the runway at an Air Force base. The Mexican mining town annihilated to make a pit mine bigger. It gets harder and harder to see unique resources go down to development year after year. It can make you sad to think about the fact that your job was to help make that happen.

This is another part of CRM that can wear each of us down. By our mid-career point, we’ve started to harden ourselves to lessen the emotional impact of seeing what we love get destroyed. We also get acclimated to doing archaeological fieldwork all the time. I’ve noticed that CRMers in their 30s and 40s start to get jaded. For some of us, this disillusionment and emotional hardening just gets worse as our career progresses.

Fortunately, this is not an incurable disease. The mid-career point is also when a lot of CRMers start to do other “value added” work that can make their jobs bearable. Teaching flintknapping, giving local history tours, going to public archaeology days, being a historical recreationist, volunteering at a local museum, participating in an academic research group. These are all things that I’ve seen CRMers do for four main reasons: 1) they now have the experience to be able to demonstrate something to others, 2) this is a means of giving back to the community (and making up for all the sites they’ve helped get “mitigated”), 3) it helps keep them sane in a world of officework, and 4) they haven’t made it up to the PI level where the work never ends and you have no free time.

Giving back to the community or demonstrating expertise is the cure to being jaded. Those who don’t do this are the most jaded in their 30s ad 40s.

Here’s to all the CRMers in their 30s and 40s

Cultural resource management archaeologists in their 30s and 40s are the transitional figures in CRM narratives. They are the future of the industry. Our excavation speed may be going down. All those shovel scoops might be catching up with us. But, we’re the transitional figure in the industry. Its future is on our shoulders.

If you haven’t given up on archaeology by your 40s, it’s likely you are a lifer. You will probably become a principal investigator or other high-level supervisor some day. These are the folks running crews in the field and starting to contribute to contracts, level of effort estimations, and request for proposals. They are still close enough to fieldwork to be able to relate to the plight of the field tech but finally have insight into the inner workings of the industry.

This post is an ode to you all of you CRMers who eat ibuprofen more often than you’d like to admit. I’ll write a post on what it’s like to do cultural resource management archaeology in my 50s and 60s when I get there.

Got anything to add? Write a comment below or send me an email.

Having trouble finding work in cultural resource management archaeology? Still blindly mailing out resumes and waiting for a response? Has your archaeology career plateaued and you don’t know what to do about it? Download a copy of the new book “Becoming an Archaeologist: Crafting a Career in Cultural Resource Management” Click here to learn more.

Check out Succinct Research’s contribution to Blogging Archaeology. Full of amazing information about how blogging is revolutionizing archaeology publishing. For a limited time you can GRAB A COPY FOR FREE!!!! Click Here

“Resume-Writing for Archaeologists” is now available on Amazon.com. Click Here and get detailed instructions on how you can land a job in CRM archaeology today!

Small Archaeology Project Management is now on the Kindle Store. Over 300 copies were sold in the first month! Click Here and see what the buzz is all about.

Join the Succinct Research email list and receive additional information on the CRM and heritage conservation field.

Get killer information about the CRM archaeology industry and historic preservation.