This summer I embarked upon updating my CV for my tenure case. Fingers crossed that when you read this email my department will have approved my tenure case, which will mean I’ll be promoted to associate professor next spring. Going through every single archaeological project I’ve ever worked on since 2000 has brought back memories. It’s also caused me to think about how all the cultural resource management projects I’ve worked on have shaped my career.
Since completing my undergraduate archaeological field school in 2000, I’ve worked on dozens of projects. I’ve written or co-authored over 60 CRM technical reports, and I’ve lost track of how many projects I worked on but didn’t help write up. The last five years have been the slowest in my career with regard to archaeological fieldwork because, as a professor, I don’t get out into the field much anymore.
(NOTE: If you want to do archaeological fieldwork, don’t go into academia or CRM principal investigator. The higher you go in archaeology the less actual fieldwork you do.)
I recalled so many memorable projects. I remembered some bad ones, but the good ones stood out:
- The one where we had a knife show in the field.
- The one where I found the best chicken fried steak in Washington State.
- The one where we found an unrecorded petroglyph panel hidden in a slot canyon in rural Pima County right before a monsoon rainstorm.
- The one where we took a side trip to see a petroglyph boulder in the middle of the desert in Pinal County.
- The one where we booked petite suites, and each room had a jacuzzi in it.
- The one where the hotel gave out all you can drink beer for free. Every night. All you could drink for about two hours. We stayed there for nine months. It was good times.
- The one where one of the crew members found a $100 bill under a pool table at the bar then asked the guys playing pool there, “Did one of you lose a $100 bill?” and the guys said, “Yeah,” and the crew member gave them the $100 only to rethink his decision after they started laughing at him. Rookie mistake.
- The one where we almost got swept away driving a university van through a storm-swollen stream to get to a place where locals said Bonnie and Clyde had a shootout with the police. We made it. I have no idea if Bonnie and Clyde were ever there as there was no commemorative plaque. Then, we had to traverse the stream to get back again.
- The one where I dug shovel probes at the wrong intersection in Adams County, Washington and had to drive 600 miles round trip through a snowstorm in the Cascades back to the APE to dig a single shovel probe through permafrost just to make sure there wasn’t anything there and get a GPS point to show we’d done the work.
- The one where the students had an eating contest, and one student ate almost 60 McNuggets and another one ate 18 Krispy Cream donuts and almost puked.
- The one where we escaped a lightning storm in Cochise County, running away from lightning arcing skywards from some power transmission towers, barely making it across a wash as it was flash flooding.
I’ve had those memories and hundreds more. Good times.
How does one gauge what makes projects better than others? I’ve decided to evaluate the best projects by:
- Location: Setting does make a powerful impact on how cool a project is.
- Colleagues: Who you’re doing the work with can also make or break a project.
- Discovery: Of course, archaeology is best when you’re finding cool stuff.
Even though I had so many adventures and worked on a lot of projects, they weren’t all memorable. Sometimes we found rad sites and cool artifacts. Other times the work was in unimaginably beautiful places, but we didn’t find anything. Sometimes the people I worked with were cool, but the project wasn’t really that great.
There are very few projects that had a high enough mixture of discovery, collegiality, and location that I’d consider it a top project. Those are the few that stand out from the rest.
The Top 5 Archaeology Projects I’ve Worked On (so far)
It was hard to winnow this down to a top five projects list. The following five made the cut because they were in cool locations, with cool people, and we found cool stuff. Or they played an outsized impact on my career. This is a totally subjective list but it’s something to get the ball rolling:
5. University of Idaho Field School, Miami, OK (2000): I had to put this one in here because it’s the project that let me know archaeology was what I wanted to do for a living. The project focused on a turn-of-the-twentieth century Miami Nation allotment farmstead. I spent the first week busting through a macadam driveway with a pick. Had a blast doing it. It was hot, and half the field season got rained out but, after doing this project, I knew what career path I was going to follow.
Location: 7/10. Colleagues: 10/10. Discovery: 8/10.
4. Data Recovery at the Japanese Gulch Site, Mukilteo, WA (2008): This was one of the first CRM projects I led. It focused on sediments containing the refuse from a late 19th/early 20th century Japanese worker’s village on the Puget Sound. I remember recovering some awesome artifacts including the largest Japanese ceramics collection I’ve ever seen. We also came up with some other interesting artifacts including a bottle with the remnants of some mercury II chloride, which showed me that historical artifacts can be toxic and that needs to be accounted for. A historian working with the company interviewed some elders who had lived at the Japanese Gulch village. The Japanese residents were interned in concentration camps during World War II and the village was leveled before they could come back to their homes. Today, there is a monument to the former community in Mukileto that commemorates those who once lived there.
Location: 7/10. Colleagues: 10/10. Discovery: 9/10.
3. The River Street Public Archaeology Project, Boise, ID (2015): I wrote a book on this one so you can go look it up. This is the project I did for my dissertation in the River Street Neighborhood in Boise, which was an ethnic neighborhood that housed poor white, African American, Basque, and other immigrant families in the early 20thcentury. I hold this project in such high esteem because it brought together a bunch of local residents who were interested in the neighborhood’s history to do a public archaeology project. There were elementary school students digging with their grandparents. University students who were part of a field school. CRMers who volunteered. Even residents of a nearby homeless shelter came out to work at the site. We identified the first Basque handball court built in Boise. The archaeological excavations concentrated on the Erma Hayman House, which has now been rehabilitated as one of two African American historic properties in Boise. We did the project just in time too. The block we excavated on has subsequently been developed and the rehabilitation of the Hayman House likely destroyed any remaining archaeology on that parcel. Only a small portion of intact sediments in the project area remains today. I remain active on the historic preservation component to this project even thought the archaeology was completed almost 10 years ago. This is the project that helped me land my current job as an assistant professor. (http://www.riverstreethistory.com)
Location: 9/10. Colleagues: 10/10. Discovery: 8/10.
2. Data Recovery at Archaic sites in Glacier National Park, East Glacier, MT (2014): I helped Blackfeet tribal members do data recovery at a site in the boundaries of Glacier National Park. We recovered the base of an Alberta Stemmed projectile point, which dates to the early Holocene (https://www.projectilepoints.net/Points/Alberta.html). We stayed at a campground on Duck Lake, which is on the Blackfeet Reservation. No cell service. Some electricity. We had to bathe in a glacier-fed alpine lake and slept in small cabins that had a single electrical outlet and lamp. We were basically glamping every day. Each weekend was filled with day hikes in Glacier, Blackfeet cultural events, and going into town to grab groceries or do laundry. Every evening was spent relaxing next to a campfire beneath a sky full of stars. Truly, this was an amazing project in almost every way.
Location: 10/10. Colleagues: 10/10. Discovery: 10/10.
1. Estate Little Princess Archaeological Field School, St. Croix, USVI (2018–2019, 2022): Picture working on a beautiful semitropical island, meters away from the beach, with a commanding view of the Caribbean Sea. Now use a machete to chop your way inland through the smoldering jungle and dig shovel probes in a space without a whisper of breeze when its 85 degrees with 99% humidity. You can hear soothing, comforting sea breezes but you don’t get to enjoy them until lunch time. Nevertheless, this has been one of my favorite projects.
I think the thing that puts this project at the top of my list is how much I’ve learned through the course of this project. Being on an all-Black project team in an all-Black community working on Black history is very special to me. I’ve never experienced anything like it. This project goes beyond archaeology and has helped me learn more about what it means to be African American, what we’ve gone through, what we’ve done in the past, and what we’re doing today. Sharing this experience with young Black students is even more empowering. This project makes me feel positively about what archaeology can accomplish and how it can help human beings move into the future.
Location: 10/10. Colleagues: 10/10. Discovery: 10/10
What makes a great archaeology project?
As I tried to rank all these projects, I started to wonder why I felt like certain projects were better than others? There were times when we found rad stuff in whack locations (ex. Archaic sites located next to a runway on an Air Force base in Arizona.) There were also times when we went to cool locations but didn’t find anything. It’s fun being out there but even better when you find stuff.
Working with excellent colleagues is the one thing that separates the good projects from the mediocre. Collegiality is also how projects go bad.
There’s nothing worse than working for a horrible company that keeps getting cool projects. The thrill of discovery is always tainted by corner-cutting, low-balling, corporate sleaze bags who try to squeeze every penny out of the budget and every ounce of effort out of the crew. Asking crew to buy their own ice while working in 100+ degree temperatures in the Sonoran Desert is a real morale breaker. Forcing the crew to work overtime but not paying them OT wages is another one (Even worse is making salaried folks work overtime while forcing project hires to sit in the truck and wait without getting paid.).
Horsing around with people’s paycheck is the fastest way to turn employees against the company, against the client, and against each other. Honest work for honest pay is all any of us ever ask, so messing with their money is tantamount to being considered dishonest. Paying people different rates for the same position is insidious and will make your employees pissed. Having people do #freearchaeology (e.g. doing unpaid work) is how you’re able to hasten your race to the bottom but it’s also how you destroy the work ethic of otherwise eager employees. Nobody wants to work for a robber baron. If they do, they’re not going to like it and they’re not going to do it for long.
Monkeying around with folks’ career paths is another no no. Holding back good people because they have children sour’s the crew’s resolve to try hard. So is promoting people because they’re your buddy rather than because they’re good at their job. Nobody likes working for a kiss a$$. Nobody respects those folks in the field, nor do they respect management that does that sort of thing.
Messing with people’s lodging is another way to make a project suck. Double-bunking crews in rat $hit hotels will make people not want to work for you. Double-bunking always sucks. I signed up to work for a professional, for-profit company not a summer camp. While at work, I don’t want to share my room with anyone. The fact that you didn’t budget for people to be grown ups makes me not want to work for you. Thank God I got out of full time CRM before they started housing the whole crew in the same Airbnb. It takes a lot to share lodging with co-workers which is why it sounds horrible to force the whole crew in one “Road Rules-style” debacle.
Working on bad crews is the fastest way to make a project suck. It sucks when people don’t want to be out there. We can handle in climate weather. We can handle physically strenuous conditions. But we can’t handle dishonest, cheapskate, abusive, meat grinder companies. All the worst projects I ever worked on were for places that valued dollars over people or science. Places where people were getting cheated, ignorant kiss a$$es were the managers, and archaeological technicians were considered less valuable than a shovel.
Conversely, all the best projects I ever worked on were staffed by people who were happy to be there. Folks who worked well with each other. Where people were getting paid the same and had the same chances for promotion. Where employees on the project were treated like intelligent, valuable, adults. When the workplace climate is good, we can put up with a few of the things that I said were non-negotiable in the previous paragraphs. We’ll share lodging with other folks who want to be there and are good roommates. To a certain extent, we will do a teency bit of #freearchaeology as long as its for the right reasons. For example, I didn’t expect to get paid to do my undergraduate archaeological field school because I knew I needed that class to have a chance at a career in archaeological fieldwork. While the students in my field school get paid these days, I’m sure some folks would do it for food and lodging because they also want careers in archaeology.
#Freearchaeology shouldn’t even be a thing when it comes to cultural resource management archaeology projects. This is why the other aspects of the work need to be good for in order to have that positive experience. People need to know they’re valued by the company and the company is doing everything it can to help its employees further their careers and meet their personal needs. Basically, companies and organizations that care about those of us working in the field were the ones that had projects that met my top 5 list.
What about you? What is your favorite archaeology project? What do you think makes a good archaeology project?
Tell us all in the comments box 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.