Archaeology jobs can be carried out by professionals with various backgrounds, including academia, museums, government agencies, and private companies. Volunteers are also widely used in the field and in the laboratory.
There are several different archaeological works, that is, works carried out to carry out an archaeological investigation. Some of these jobs are done by archaeologists, but others are done by people with a variety of other types of professional training – because other fields such as classics and anthropology overlap with archeology – or none at all.
One type of archeology job is as an instructor or faculty member who provides instruction in archeology at an institution of higher learning, be it a community college, college, or university. An archeology professor may instruct undergraduates, graduates, or both, and may be employed by many departments beyond archaeology, including anthropology, art history, classics, history, and theology. Academic archeology assignments often last nine months, and the archaeologist can spend the summer on other activities.
Archeology works in museums may or may not have an academic affiliation. Museum positions can include field work or administrative tasks. A museum archaeologist would likely create exhibits as well as conduct, publish, and present research. In a museum affiliated with a university, some employees may have commitments to the university as well as their positions within the museum.
Various federal government departments employ people in archeology jobs. This includes the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Forest Service, which combine to employ around 800 archaeologists. States also employ archaeologists in the State Department of Historic Preservation and may also use the services of archaeologists in their departments of highways, parks, and water resources. If a city has an archaeological site, it can hire archaeologists to advise it. Oversight of such situations is called CRM, cultural resource management. The other side of CRM is the private companies that investigate CRM sites. Archaeologists in this area locate and excavate sites.
It turns out that archeology is one of the fields where volunteers are widely used. Depending on whether or not they have excavation experience, volunteers can perform archeology work in the field or in the laboratory. They can be displayed on the website itself, for example, or they can perform a variety of activities in the lab, from sorting and labeling to identifying and analyzing data.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
