For as long as there’s been a National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), archaeological field schools have been a rite of passage for cultural resource management (CRM) archaeologists in the United States. Field experience has been seen as essential for a career in CRM archaeology. Many CRM companies are reluctant to hire archaeological technicians without a field school. Despite the centrality of field school to archaeology careers, there are a number of systemic barriers that prevent more people from taking a field school. When added to the list of other things affecting archaeology education, the lack of access to the field school experience is a threat to the future of cultural resource management archaeology.
How are things more different today than they were in the past 50+ years of CRM archaeology? I took field school as an undergraduate in 1999, right before I finished my anthropology degree. I explain more below but here was my financial situation back then:
- I made about $11.00/hr., which wasn’t that bad at the turn of the millennium.
- My rent and utilities were about $500/month.
- I spent about $200/month on groceries and at least $200/month on fast food.
- Tuition at my university was between $700 and 900/semester.
- Books were about $300/semester
- I was able to save enough to pay for each semester (books, tuition, parking, ect.) in cash.
- I had no car payment, no kids, no spouse, no mortgage, no real obligations beyond my monthly expenses.
- My field school cost about $700 for 8 weeks in rural Oklahoma not including travel.
This is not the situation my students find themselves in today:
- The average wage in the San Francisco Bay Area is almost $40/hr. but I’m sure my students make less than that (I hear $20/hr. is what they’re aiming for from each of the several jobs they do).
- Average rent in Berkeley is $3,140 for a 710 sq. ft. apartment.
- Tuition at my institution is $7,500/semester.
- Books and supplies at my institution average $870/semester.
- The average cell phone and internet bill is about $180/month (I didn’t have internet at my house until after I graduated from college).
- A decent smartphone is $400–$1,000; a decent computer is $500—1,500. You need both of these and internet connection to participate in college these days of “shelter-in-place,” which happens at least once a year in California.
- More importantly: Many of my students have to support themselves and others while they pursue their degree.
- Field schools through IFR are well over $3,000 for 5–6 weeks, not including travel.
Traditional archaeological field schools require students to travel to remote locations to get the immersive experience of being in the field. Students and instructors leave their homes and travel to a field site to practice archaeological methods. The emphasis is on archaeology-specific skills that are non-transferrable to most other careers (e.g. digging) and students pay for this experience because they understand it will greatly increase their chances of getting a job in archaeology.
While it would be great if field schools taught transferrable skills like database management, app design, GIS, and technical writing, the biggest problem with the current system is it greatly privileges those students who can leave their lives on hold for a month and half to travel across the country or the globe to experience archaeology. Most Americans cannot quit their job, leave their families behind, and take a college class in the forest somewhere. Even worse, fewer of the students who have these privileges are taking field schools.
We are starting to see the cracks in the traditional field school model. Something has to change, and I think it’s the way we teach and the value we place on archeological field schools.
[NOTE: As usual, this blog post is going to generalize a lot. I know each of us has our own story as to how our career unfolded. We didn’t all go to field school but the majority of us did. I also know universities are not against teaching students how to do CRM. We just don’t know how because most professors didn’t do CRM before they became archaeology professors. Changing an entire academic department curriculum’s focus is not easy. It could take more than 20 years to hire the professors you need to start teaching CRM, and you’d have to convince a large portion of them that preparing students for careers in CRM is a worthwhile endeavor. Finally, I know there are going to be CRM hiring managers that won’t think these ideas are worthwhile because it will require companies to be proactive. Most companies will prefer to stay on the same pathway because it’s what they’re used to doing. Please read this with an open mind as to what the future could be because, I can tell you, it’s already happening in a town near you.]
In a nutshell, here’s the problem with archaeological field schools
Field schools don’t teach what is necessary to work in CRM: I’ve covered this extensively on this blog. It’s one of the reasons I started blogging back in 2012. In general, universities do not think it is their job to train their students how to do CRM even though CRMers need a university degree to do CRM and to meet the Secretary of Interior’s Standard in Archaeology. CRM companies can’t issue their own degrees, so they must rely on universities.
Currently, archaeological field school is the only proxy for what being a CRM field tech is like. Working in CRM requires experiential learning and field school is the only widely recognized version of experiential learning. It’s also practically the only thing CRM field techs and university archaeology professors have in common— the vast majority of us went to an archaeological field school. CRM companies and graduate school admissions boards rely on field school as an indicator as to how serious you are about doing archaeology because we know how transformative experience field school can be.
Shout out to profs who are teaching CRM. Most of this is not taking place at R1 schools, except rare programs like Simon Frasier University’s Resource and Environmental Management Program. Teaching CRM is more common at R2 institutions like my alma mater the University of Idaho, Sonoma State University, and community colleges like Cuyahoga Community College.
The number of field schools is shrinking: Fewer and fewer universities are running field schools for a number of reasons. First, there are fewer tenure track archaeology faculty. Universities have prioritized increasing enrollments and cutting costs (while bloating administrative salaries and building exorbitant rec centers), which has led to adjunctification in higher ed. (e.g. departments where most of the classes are taught by low-paid lecturers, adjuncts, and graduate students with short-term contracts). This makes it easy to put courses in the catalog, but short-term academic laborers do not have the time, resources, or incentive to run an archaeological field school.
Second, universities are risk adverse. They don’t like activities where there is the potential for injury, harassment, and/or other adverse effects. This is largely the fault of those archaeology professors who have not addressed the “Las Vegas Syndrome” that is all too common with archaeological fieldwork (e.g. what happens in the field, stays in the field). Well, what happens in the field does not stay in the field. We shouldn’t even want it to stay in the field if we are serious about training the next generation of archaeologists because we should be modeling appropriate field behavior. Continuing to operate field schools like they’re a sequel in the The Hangover movie series is a big problem in archaeology.
Third, I’m not even sure we should be constantly digging sites just to train students. How can we justify the ethics of digging sites that are not threatened so students can learn how to dig for artifacts? We’ve been doing this for centuries. Professors, isn’t digging stuff up just because we wanted to how we got some of the problems we have today? How about training students on collections that haven’t been adequately analyzed or on CRM projects where sites are truly threatened? Especially when digging sites was one of the lesser activities I did when I was a CRMer. (What about shovel probes? My back can tell you that is a different matter). Surely there must be a different way.
The Institute for Field Research (IFR) is rapidly becoming a clearinghouse for archaeological field schools, but they still are not running enough schools to train all the archaeologist the CRM industry needs. Field schools are becoming competitive and rare.
Field school is a bottleneck: When I was an undergraduate, archaeological field school provided as many credits as two regular courses but almost cost as much as an entire semester (If you’re doing the math, I went to Boise State University. As mentioned before, it cost $700—900/semester and the field school I went to was around $700. Today, it costs about $4,000/semester for in-state tuition at BSU and field schools through IFR are about $3,300.)
I was one of those non-traditional students as an undergrad. I came from a single-parent, working-class household. My mom was broke, living paycheck to paycheck taking care of my brother and sister who still lived at home, so she couldn’t pay for any of it. I was working my way through college, paying tuition, and living expenses by working at least 30 hours each week pushing shopping carts and boxing groceries. But my employer wasn’t going to keep paying me for hours I didn’t work so I had to take a leave of absence from my job for six weeks while also paying all my bills back home.
Basically, I went into debt to go to field school. I spent all my savings to cover the costs of the field school as well as rent and utilities while I was gone (a savings it took me 3 years to accumulate). I had to use credit cards to cover my expenses while I was attending the field school and took out even more credit cards to charge my next semester of school. All of this took me over a year to pay off after I graduated. In the end, I had to move back in with my father for a year once my lease was up because I couldn’t afford to pay the debts racked up during field school and my remaining tuition.
Without that field school, I probably wouldn’t have become an archaeologist though. After field school, I realized I loved archaeology. It was the only job I’d ever had didn’t want to quit after the first week. I loved being in the field, digging, finding artifacts, and constantly learning something new. The field school I attended was sponsored by the university where I would later get my Master’s. it was also where I met my future MA advisor who recruited me to their grad program a few years later. This adviser would become one of my best colleagues, a person I still ask about career advice more than 20 years later.
Field school has become a bottleneck for every student who wants to become a professional archaeologist because most of them are not willing to give up their entire lives to travel away from home for 6 weeks just to see if they want to do archaeology. Only a privileged few will be able to pay for it outright. A larger number are willing to take on debt to attend, which only contributes to the stymieing level of student loan debt in the United States. Nevertheless, the existing field school system caters entirely to students with time and money.
Most archaeology students will decide not to take a field school because it is expensive and forces them to give up their main source of income. This is even more common among BIPOC and working-class students as well as non-traditional students with families. You can basically forget about field school if you’re BIPOC and have a family, which is exactly the kind of student we need in archaeology because their forced pragmatic understanding of the world is nearly absent in archaeological method and theory. Many of the workplace problems we face in CRM are because the industry is not conducive to families, specifically mothers. Creating an alternative to the existing system is good for every student who wants to become an archaeologist but will disproportionately benefit those who have been structurally excluded because of the traditional field school system.
Going to field school was the right decision for me because it affirmed that archaeology was something I wanted to do. I was a single, childless, cisgender man who was willing to do whatever it took to become an archaeologist. Most people are not like me. I can confidently say most field school students do not get the same results I did. Very few field school students will pursue a career in archaeology. For them, it is not worth it to quit their job and go into debt just to find out they don’t want to do archaeology. I truly feel for those who want to do field school but they can’t because their lives are too expensive and complicated, and universities don’t make field school more flexible.
One way to make workplace experience more attainable is to introduce aspiring archaeologists to archaeology well before they’re dropping coin on field school. Let them know what it’s like to do archaeology for a living as soon as possible so they can make an informed decision.
Field school is a screening mechanism for graduate programs: Because most archaeology professors went to field school, it is hard for us to understand why aspiring archaeologists wouldn’t bet the farm to pursue the dream of becoming an archaeologist. This is one of the many biases university professors have when evaluating grad school applications. We suffer from Survivorship Bias (e.g. focusing on those of us who survived a process and overlooking the thousands who failed), Authority Bias (e.g. we are more influenced by people we consider authorities), as well as all the other biases that come with being a privileged tenure track professor. Overcoming these biases is hard.
More than once, I’ve heard a professor judge a grad school applicant for their lack of field experience. It’s as if paying for the privilege of digging trenches for 4 weeks at a UNESCO site in Greece somehow makes you more qualified for a PhD program than an applicant who was a real adult; you know, like someone who had been the manager a drug testing lab for 4 years. The lab manager was responsible for running samples, maintaining records, producing reports, and supervising lab technicians. I can teach you how to dig a hole. If you’re perceptive, you can learn how to see, feel, and hear sediment changes. You can learn how to identify artifacts by reading and observing them. But, I cannot teach a grad student how to be a grownup; I can’t make you be a professional who is doing this to better their life, not just because it sounds cool or because think you want to become a professor or you just don’t know what to do and are afraid of figuring out your life through a string of unsatisfying jobs until you find the place where you belong. The lab manager was adulting, paying bills, staying gainfully employed, learning lab procedures, and supervising other human beings with all their problems. This career experience suggests to me they could do a lab-based, artifact analysis dissertation more successfully than the other applicant who leisurely dug stuff up and spent their evenings drinking wine and swimming in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, there are some of us who would take the person with “Classical experience” over the lab manager.
(Don’t get me started with the way they treat folks who were doing CRM for a while before applying to a PhD. If you meet me in person, I’ll tell you how that is considered by some professors.)
The UNESCO field school student’s experience is closer to that of many university professors, especially those who went straight through from undergrad to PhD. Few R1 faculty come from working class families. Few of us had to work our way through school (Not doing internships and postdocs. I’m talking working in the Amazon Fulfillment Center or night stocking at Costco or driving for Uber and Lyft while delivering Instacart for 40+ hours a week). We professors found ways to go to field school, even if it wasn’t at a spectacular site, so that’s the experience we know. And, it’s hard for us to get that out of our heads when we’re recruiting grad students. Unfortunately, this partially blinds us to those applicants with potential but haven’t gone to field school. It’s hard for us to see what we haven’t seen before. We also tend to listen to the opinions of senior faculty because we value their experience, even if it keeps us from listening to our hearts. And the old timers really, really like the idea of a good ol’ fashioned field school.
The lack of a field school is what keeps so many BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, working-class, and students who are parents out of archaeology. Their experiences are so far from what most archaeology professors know that it’s hard to see how they could succeed in a grad program without having actually done archaeology first. This means we’re trying to get diversity in archaeology from a very, very small group of crazy a$$ed non-traditional students like me who were literally willing to become homeless just to do a field school in rural Oklahoma. That’s not a reliable pathway towards diversifying or even sustaining archaeology in the future.
There aren’t enough students attending universities to keep archaeology going: This is the elephant in the room. This is the real reason why CRM companies are finally reaching out to universities to find students.
The decrease in anthropology enrollments is why departments are trying to figure out ways to become relevant, which we hope will increase enrollments. Companies need anthro grads with a field school if they’re going to have field techs to keep their companies afloat. If there were still tens of thousands of undergrads struggling to make it in CRM archaeology, the companies would keep acting the way they have since 1966. If anthro departments could demonstrate to Millennials and Gen-Zers how they can help them get a quality job, there would be a waitlist of undergraduate anthro students for every class just like there is in coding, business, engineering, law, and medicine. This isn’t the case so both universities and CRM companies are at a loss as to what they should do. I say they start by rethinking the way they’re training the next generation.
Where do we start?
Here’s my personal opinion: Both universities and companies need to truly rethink how they recruit students and prepare them for the workforce.
The first step is accepting reality with equanimity. That makes it easier for us to see the problems we need to address.
By privileging field school, all of us have been maintaining the systemic barriers that have kept people out of archaeology. As archaeology tries to adapt itself to the 21st century, we have to face the things that keep us back. Recognizing how we’ve lionized field school helps us realize not only have we been preventing CRM from having quality new hires, we have also been stunting diversity initiatives and proving our relevancy.
Rethinking archaeology training will force us to face painful realities:
U.S. Anthropology Departments: Acknowledge that all your students are dropping five to six figures on a degree from your institution because they expect a return on that investment. This isn’t Europe where students get paid to go to college and students can choose whatever topic they find interesting because they know retirement, healthcare, and childcare are covered by the state and they will still get paid even if they get fired or laid off. Nobody in the United States goes to any of our lectures because they want to hear us talk. None of my students read my stuff because they want to. Nobody is as interested in my research as much as I am. Students want the degree so they can get paid after graduation because employers still consider a college degree as evidence that a person has above average intelligence and can follow instructions no matter how senseless they are. College graduates are perfect employees. Students know this and it is why they’re going to college.
Anthropology departments need to do a much better job of connecting students to the workplace. We need to show that our degrees help students get jobs with benefits. One way is to get them a job in the industry BEFORE they graduate.
CRM Companies: Acknowledge that archaeological field technicians are why you have a company. It’s not because of the regs. It’s not because you are protecting sites for American society. It’s definitely not because of your clients. It is because there is a bright, strong, and willing group of aspiring archaeologists who haven’t yet been beaten down by the industry. They dig the probes, walk the transects, and record the sites. They work in the rain and heat while we’re sitting back in our comfy offices. Field techs are the backbone of your company. Gone are the days of treating field techs like they’re no better than shovels. They are not tools you can discard once they’re broken. Therefore, it is in your best interest to cultivate tomorrow’s industry through the archaeology students we have today. The best way to do that is to create an industry that is professional, acknowledges families are good for CRMers, and understands employees are valuable assets.
(NOTE: I know it is possible to cultivate a good work environment in CRM because there are a couple CRM companies I’ve always wanted to work for. They rarely hire because they’re involved in local universities and basically recruit directly from these schools by running training programs like field schools and sponsoring scholarships to help make it possible for non-traditional and BIPOC students to attend. These companies also foster a work environment that is conducive to having a family and being non-white, so their employees stay for decades. Email me if you want to know which companies I’m talking about.)
CRMers, you cannot wait for universities to help you out. The NHPA has been around for over 50 years and CRM has been waiting for universities to create skilled new hires for over 50 years, but this hasn’t happened because universities don’t know how to do that. Universities are not for profit businesses; they don’t know how to make a profit. Archaeology professors are not CRMers; they don’t know how to do CRM archaeology. How can universities prepare students to do something they know nothing about? They can’t.
CRM companies must take this issue by the horns. CRM companies need to connect with archaeology students and train them directly BEFORE they graduate. That way you are cultivating a pipeline of quality, skilled, motivated young CRMers without having to spend the first 15 months of a field tech’s career teaching them how to do archaeology while you lose money.
Once we’ve acknowledged the painful position we’re all in, we can start thinking about how to change it. Go from known to unknown, but first start with what is known. We know the current system is broken. It isn’t doing what we want it to do. Now, we can work on solutions
How do we address the problem?
I see two solutions to this problem:
1) Create public-private collaborations to solve both the decline in anthropology students and CRM labor shortages. Let universities and companies work together to create the pipeline of skilled archaeologists the industry needs. However, this will not address the underlying problems with being a new archaeologist (namely precarity, low pay, and a lack of benefits).
2) Create an apprenticeship program. This is an even better solution because it would provide more for the long-term survival of CRMers in the industry. Ideally, this apprenticeship would follow the lines of the trade jobs and result in unionized, skilled archaeological field technicians who could use collective bargaining to push for better working conditions.
In my next post I will talk about how public-private collaborations could remedy some of these problems. I will pick up the apprenticeship solution at a later date.
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