Talking about the occupational burnout amongst archaeologists
In the summer of 2023, I received news that I’d achieved tenure at the university where I now work. That’s the good part. The bad part was that I didn’t feel like an associate professor of anthropology. I know I should have been happy. Or, at least relieved. The odds of landing a tenure track position in the United States are not good. Somewhere between 10 and 17 percent of PhDs get tenure track offers. Some researchers have determined 12.8 percent of PhDs get a tenure track job. But, all of that depends on where you got your PhD because 80 percent of all professors come from only 20 percent of universities. I teach at one of those top 20% schools but I didn’t get my PhD from one of them. Something like 40—50% of the PhDs in our department get a tenure track job within 10 years of graduation (which means they do several low-paying postdocs in the interim). Things are better for the graduates of our program but, regardless of where you get your PhD, landing a tenure track job is extremely hard. I am fortunate.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t feeling any sort of joy upon hearing the news. Initially I thought it just hadn’t sunken in? Maybe I had too many things on my mind to really absorb the accomplishment I’d achieved? I spent the summer of 2023 going through the motions that an archaeology professor would undertake. Teaching online summer school, doing archaeological fieldwork, teaching a field school, administering grants and applying for more, writing… I just tried to keep moving at a steady pace. Never really slowed down. Just kept running like I had when I started my PhD in 2014.
Then something strange happened in the fall of 2023. I had just been awarded a significant contract to do work in 2024 and had been accepted to a faculty leadership academy, but I suddenly lost all motivation. Archaeology was no longer interesting. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I could no longer plan for the upcoming field season. I struggled with teaching and found it excruciating to grade assignments. It was hard to inspire the students I was mentoring. In a lot of ways, I’d lost all motivation to do anything other than hang around the house and do family tasks.
After more than 10 years of going full tilt as a PhD student and assistant professor, getting between four and six hours of sleep a night, every night, every week, every month for six years because I was trying to earn tenure. After struggling to do insightful research, valuable mentoring, and excellent teaching. Giving over 40 guest lectures, workshops, and presentations in Europe and the United States. After worrying whether or not my department would vote to grant me tenure, I found it hard to do anything related to archaeology.
I was an archaeozombie…
Realizing that burnout is real
By 2024, I was starting to drown. The work I’d put off for months was piling up. I had funding that I wasn’t spending because I couldn’t bring myself to jump through the bureaucratic hoops necessary to get money out of my university. I couldn’t bring myself to hire any new students in my lab or connect with the elders in the communities where I work. All I was doing was the absolute minimum to get my paycheck. I was just going through the motions. Meanwhile, my university started trying to saddle me with more assignments. Requests to join more committees. More committee work with local and national archaeology organizations. More advising for BIPOC students. It seemed like the minute folks knew I had tenure, they all started asking me to do more.
[Trigger Warning: The following paragraph may cause strong emotions amongst some of those who will read it. I invite you to use this as an opportunity to explore inside your mind and think about why you find these words shocking. Why would my opinion trouble you? What do your feelings reveal about yourself when you read the following paragraph? Only send me an email about it once you have spent several months thinking about yourself, your worldview, and whether it matters to you, or me, or anyone to say anything to me about this paragraph. Also, it doesn’t reflect the opinion of my employer or my colleagues.]
Despite all the extra effort my colleagues and I were putting into this job, the students at my university went on strike every year. Or, occupied portions of the campus. Or, smashed things up while occupying the campus while on strike. During their persistent and ongoing protests/occupations, they destroyed a historic property on campus that is probably that will only make it easier for the university to demolish it. The students wanted all the faculty to join the protests and started protesting us when we didn’t do it to the levels they expected. They wanted more money and more time– indefinite amounts of time without any limits. There was no schedule on when we would be allowed to just do our jobs. They never had any long-term goals or outcomes to these protests/occupations. The strikes resulted in higher salaries (which is good and necessary) but these higher stipends mean there will be fewer PhD students in the future because our budget must adjust to these new levels. But the current students are not concerned about that. They just want a bigger paycheck now. Let the faculty worry about tomorrow after today’s students have graduated. The protests and occupations have not changed anything on campus. The university still keeps doing whatever it wants. It’s adapted to constant protests. The university is prepared to outlast any sort of occupation, protest, or strike because as long as the students still want a degree bad enough to keep paying tuition, the university has all the leverage. Nothing is going to change on this campus unless the students all initiate a massive tuition strike and boycott the school entirely. But that will mean students won’t get their diplomas and the prestige of a diploma from this institution is why they’re even going here. Academia’s status quo will remain.
And, then there was the pandemic…. Not enough words to talk about what the pandemic did to me regarding my job other than the fact that it showed me a whole new way forward. It showed me that colleges can grant degrees without being in person and that students will still take classes online because they want to learn, and they want the degree. I learned I can teach from my home, get paid, and students can still earn degrees without coming to campus.
All this turmoil has made it hard for me to plan anything at my institution because I can never know if it’s going to happen or not. I can’t teach classes that rely heavily on graduate student instructors because the graduate students withhold the grades when they strike every November. It’s not easy to take students into the field because they’re working two or three jobs just to afford tuition. They don’t have the time unless you pay them to do field school. Periodically, the university cuts our budget even though they keep raising more money than ever before. This means we can’t even be sure if I’ll be able to teach the archaeological methods classes students need to get a job in CRM because I’ll probably be covering the classes they need to graduate. All of this takes more time and energy than you think. There is less time to write even though they evaluate my performance based on writing.
More precarity = more anxiety and stress. This is a pathway that leads to burnout.
My colleagues told me that I was experiencing “burnout.” “WTF is burnout?” At first, I didn’t even think it was real. Evidentially, it’s very common in my department and my university. Many of my colleagues have experienced it. Some are living through it right now. They said they found coping mechanisms (Most of which sounded to just be more work but not work for the university. For example, starting a new archaeology project not related to the dozens of ones you already have to do for work). Those living with burnout all came to the realization that they needed money, the university had it, and they needed to just cope with burnout and other mental health issues to get their paycheck. They said it would pass. I wasn’t too sure about that.
Unsatisfied, I reached out to the mental health industry. I talked to some counselors about it. Two of them said I should quit my job. My wife said I needed to find new counselors. Then I went to a workplace therapy group that was full of people with really real problems in the workplace. Bullying. Racism. Sexism. Surviving 60-hour workweeks. Even physical violence in the workplace. Hearing their stories made me realize just how fu¢ked up capitalism is. If you think CRM is fu¢ked up, attend some workplace group therapy sessions. There are some villains among us. The folks in that group were the ones who really needed to quit their jobs. I reached out to my employer’s occupational health department. I wasn’t given the option to talk to a human being, even via zoom. They told me that whenever I feel anxiety start welling up in my chest, I should take a deep breath and just let it out. They also gave me some PDFs and YouTube videos to watch. The videos just confirmed that professors are burnt out and asked how administrators could keep us professors from quitting. There was no advice on what to do about it. My employer’s goal was to figure out how they could keep me grinding away without paying me more money so they could keep me in the kitchen cooking up more “product.” In six months of reaching out, I hadn’t found anything that helped me.
What if I’m not ready to burn out?
It took almost a year, but I finally found an occupational therapist who gave me useful advice. She’s been working with me for most of 2024 and I’ve found her to be the only person truly keeping me from quitting my job. I still have trouble finding the motivation to care about working but I know I need to pay my bills. I have a job and it’s a “good” one (e.g. one that other people want badly, pays a livable wage, and has benefits. In the U.S., that’s the best we can hope for). In my heart I know I am fortunate to have made it to where I am today. It wasn’t easy and it sure as hell was not luck (NOTE: I wrote a blog post about what it takes to even have a chance to become a professor. You can read it here.)
While I am still experiencing burnout, I don’t want to quit being an archaeologist. I don’t want to quit my job. But I do need to figure out a way to keep moving forward in a healthy way.
I recall having burnout back when I was doing cultural resource management archaeology. It was in the wake of the 2008 recession when I’d only been in the CRM archeology industry for about five or six years. I remember that I spent almost an entire year in the field. Something like nine months of 10-hour days away from my family, living out of a hotel, sharing a room with another CRMer. Both of us were missing our wives and kids but we still had months of fieldwork to go. I remember back then dreading leaving for the field on Monday mornings, spending the week digging and filling out forms like a zombie. Sun. Heat. Cold. Didn’t matter. I was starting not to care. We were out there doing 100% data recovery.
The way I felt about working on that project was very similar to how I feel these days. I knew I was fortunate to be one of the only people on earth who would ever see this awesome site. I’d also always wanted to be an archaeologist. It is my dream job. But all that fieldwork was wearing me down. My weeks revolved around work. I couldn’t stop thinking about that project, what it was doing to my family, my marriage, and my life. Once again, I knew the job was paying the bills and allowing me to fulfill my dream, but things weren’t what they were cracked up to be.
That project ended with an epic burnout of its own. After about 15 months of working on the project, including nine months of full-time data recovery with a crew of about 20 archaeologists, the client took the project away from my company and it was awarded to another firm. Many of the temporary field techs jumped ship to the other company while we salaried folks had to come back to a company that had just lost a multi-million-dollar contract. There was no work for us. I was laid off a few months later after having been part of that company’s “family” for three years. I was using unemployment checks to buy food for my kid and had to hit the job market again. This was the event that started me blogging in the first place as I tried to help other CRM archaeologists find work in the industry.
Will the desire to help others bring me through?
Back in 2012, when I started blogging about CRM archaeology, my goal was to help the other unemployed archaeologists I knew find work. I used a systematic approach to canvassing the region for firms and trying to drum up employment from companies before they were hiring. I was able to find another full-time position at another CRM company in a few months even though it was the depths of the recession, and nobody was hiring. Then I helped two of my colleagues get hired at this company and helped several other archaeologists get CRM work in other states. The techniques I was using formed the first of my blog posts and subsequent eBooks.
In 2012, I knew there were dozens of unemployed but gifted archaeologists who needed employment. I know this is still the case in 2024. I’m hoping my desire to help others will be the motivation I need to get through this burnout phase in my career.
I’m also hoping to open conversations about mental health in cultural resource management archaeology. Our field has problems, but it also has thousands of excellent, committed, altruistic practitioners who want to learn about the past and collect invaluable information before it is lost. We may complain about our jobs, but we don’t really talk about what this work is doing to us. We rarely talk about how we feel.
We love our jobs even though they don’t love us back.
I’m in the initial phase of investigating workplace burnout in cultural resource management archaeology and have only now started on this pathway. I do not know where it will lead. All I know is I want to keep doing archaeology and keep helping people through archaeology. I don’t think I’m ready to burnout yet.
Comment on this post if you’ve got something to say. Or send me an email. Thanks for reading.
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