I have, since starting this blog, received several emails from people asking how they can become archaeologists, or what to expect if they enter the field as professionals. It dawned on me that it would be useful to write up what I tell people so that I could just refer people here, and also it might let a few of the regular readers in on what professional archaeologists really do.
So, if you want to be an archaeologist, here's what you should probably know:
You Could've Been a Lawyer...or a CEO
One thing that I would say to would-be archaeologists is simply that they will spend alot of time training that could be spent pursuing better-paying careers. Now, this is not to dissuade these folks from getting into archaeology - I'm here, I spent the time and enjoy my career, so I definitely think that it's worth it - but the impression that I get from many people is that they think of archaeology as a field that can be easily entered, perhaps as a hobby, and it really isn't*.
A field technician is the "grunt worker" of archaeology (truth be told, they have to be intelligent and hard working, so they're hardly grunts, but this is often how they characterize themselves). Field technicians are responsible for carrying out the basic field tasks (walking survey transects, excavating units, screening dirt), as well as maintaining their own records for the project. Although some companies (and some projects) will allow field technicians who do not have a degree, you should expect that any field technician position will require a bachelors degree as well as field experience (at minimum a field school). Also, be aware that if you do an academic-oriented field school, you may not have gained the skills necessary to do CRM (cultural resource management) archaeology (consulting work and field/lab work geared towards keeping land developers in line with historic and archaeological preservation regulations), which is where the jobs are. Most field technicians work on a project-by-project basis, meaning that they should expect very little job stability, and you have to have a fair amount of experience before you should expect either a full-time job or a large number of employers keeping you busy as if you had a full-time job.
From field technician, you can work your way up to crew chief or field supervisor. On occasion, someone with only a bachelors degree and extensive experience will move up to field director or project manager. However, these jobs typically require someone with a Masters degree or a PhD (there are regulatory reasons for this, so it isn't just snobbishness). So, if you want stable, career-oriented employment in archaeology, you need to go to graduate school.
Myself, I attended a community college for two years, then transferred to the University of California, where I finished my BA. I then went to another University of California campus to get my MA. In between, I attended a field school and took other field and lab classes at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA. All told, I was in college or graduate school for approximately nine years in order to get the credentials that I need for my job. Depending on the program that one attends, this could conceivably be done in six-to-seven years (I attended a research-oriented graduate school, so my MA thesis was a very different affair from those who attend CRM-oriented graduate schools). If you are an MA student, then there is not much funding available for you, so you should expect to take whatever jobs you can find while you attend school. Basically, don't expect to have a life outside of school and work.
This is comparable to (and very often exceeds) the education burdens on someone who is earning a law degree or an MBA. However, archaeologists should expect to make significantly less money than someone with a JD or MBA. So, bear that in mind while you rack up student loans.
You may have noticed that I focused here on CRM archaeologists and didn't talk much about becoming a professor. There's a reason for that...
Academics? Meet Consulting?
Although an increasingly large number of university anthropology programs are recognizing the necessity of CRM education, most remain academically-oriented. And by academically-oriented, I do not mean that they are geared towards education (though they are, and that is certainly appropriate), but rather that the majority of university programs are geared towards archaeology as a research discipline rather than an applied discipline, and many professors like to cast aspersions upon CRM (interestingly, the professors that I have met who are most likely to do this are the ones who are least likely to have had any CRM experience, and they are typically very much mistaken in their beliefs regarding CRM.
This is a problem because the vast majority of archaeologists in North America are CRM rather than academic archaeologists. Surveys of the field performed in 2009 indicate that at least 85% (and maybe more) of all archaeologists in the United States work in CRM, either for private companies or for government regulatory agencies. So, CRM is where the jobs are, and it's growing (that 85% includes an increase in numbers from a previous 2001 survey). By contrast, when last I checked (which was admittedly a few years ago, though there's little reason to think that matters have improved), there were 10 PhDs granted every year per academic job opening in archaeology. So, the odds are severely stacked against someone who wants to go into academics, and the number of unemployed PhDs that I know is truly staggering.
So, if you decide on a career in archaeology, expect to do CRM work, and don't plan on going into academics. What this means in practical terms is that the aspiring archaeology needs to learn more than just archaeological theory and practice. Someone wanting to become an archaeologist should study laws and regulations (Tom King's is a good place to start, but should not be where you stop), the standard phased approach to regulatory compliance (I recommend Neumann and Sanford's excellent books), and business skills including basic human resource management, budgeting, and project tracking.
Also, if you wish to become an archaeologist, avoid getting the "high and mighty" attitude that I have seen many people take with them out of the university. Talking down to construction workers and Native American representatives is a great way to not get hired for another project.
You'll Use That Shovel More Than That Trowel
Every time I bring a new person into the field, they are surprised at the methods that we employ. Owing to the way that archaeology is typically portrayed int he media (including portrayals by archaeologists), there is a perception that we always dig slowly using a trowel and a brush and nothing else.
You can imagine how surprised a newbie is when they see me pull out a shovel and a dig bar. And you should see the looks on their faces when backhoes show up.
The reality is that the tools that we use are diverse, and vary depending on a number of conditions. If we are digging a site with a lot of features that are identifiable only by subtle soil changes, then we may very well dig with a trowel and a brush. If you are excavating human remains, you'll use tools even more gentle than the trowel. By contrast, if you are excavating a shell midden that lacks any clearly identifiable strata and is located on a sand dune, you are going to use a shovel. And if you are digging a light density flaked stone scatter in dense clay, you are going to pound it with a dig bar. And there are even situations that call for excavation by heavy equipment.
Although there will be a few people who assume that this is the "destructive excavation" of CRM work, each of these tools is also found in the tool rooms of university anthropology departments. We use the tool that is necessary, which sometimes means slow, careful peeling back of soils...and sometimes means pounding the shit out of dense clay so that you can actually find the buried archaeological materials.
How Do You Feel About Hiking?
Another thing that you should probably know about actual archaeology is that we don't dig as much as people think. And I don't mean that our field season is limited, or anything like that. I means that the majority of the projects on which we work are geared towards finding out where the sites are, rather than digging them up. Although this has long been true of CRM, it is also often true of academic archaeology.
The way that we determine the locations of sites is by performing surveys. We hike over a given area looking for evidence of archaeological sites. Survey methodology varies from place to place, due in large part to local geomorphic conditions. In California, we typically do surface pedestrian surveys - in most parts of California, if a site is present, there will be some evidence of it on the surface. Where we think that may not be the case, we will recommend buried site testing (where auger bores, backhoe excavation, or some other method is used to look under the surface). In other parts of the U.S., survey involves digging holes with a shovel at regular intervals looking for evidence of buried archaeological materials. While this method does involve digging, it should be noted that they are digging to look for sites, rather than digging within sites.
Get to Know Your Relevant Disciplines
In addition to the need to learn about business and regulations, you should also make sure that you either know your flora and fauna, or build up a library for looking things up. Most archaeological site records include information regarding local plants and animals, and it is also wise to get some training in how to use local historical archives (local historical society libraries, county assessor's records, library map and genealogy rooms, etc.). Again, academics will generally not train you to do this sort of work, but it is vital for a career in archaeology.
An Adventure in Paperwork
Another aspect of archaeology that tends to surprise people is that there is a lot of paperwork. Really, just a metric shit-ton of it.Get used to it.
On any given project, my paperwork consists of, at minimum, my field notes (kept in my personal notebook) and a daily work record (a form used specifically by my company, though many other companies have equivalent forms). I keep track of essentially the same things on both documents: where I am working, who is present, weather conditions, type of work, complications to doing work, anticipated and actual rate of work, and so on. I keep the notes because, after our forms have been put into cold storage, I will often be asked questions regarding something (especially if there is a complaint from a client or former employee, or if we find ourselves having to argue with a regulator or community group), and having my own notes is useful in order to save time. These notes also provide me a place to track information that is relevant to my job, but not appropriate to turn over to the client (for example: internal disputes between employees, musings on the nature of archaeological materials that are not directly relevant to the project, etc.).
Now, that's the bare minimum that I do. If I am performing survey, then I also fill out a survey form, which details the project area, where we surveyed, transect spacing, ground visibility, etc. If I am excavating a site, then each excavation unit will have a form or series of forms detailing depth of excavation, tools used, soils encountered, materials identified, etc. etc. If I am doing site condition assessments, then I will have forms related to that. If we are collecting artifact,s soils samples, or anything else, then there are forms for that as well. And when you get to the lab, you have forms detailing your lab work and the chain-of-custody of items.
And that is just talking about forms that vary from company to company. Every employer for which I have worked has required a photo log for all pictures taken, and if you are recording archaeological sites, you will have to fill out the appropriate forms (which vary from state to state).
Then of course, there's the basic administrative paperwork that you have to handle. If you're a field technician, get used to filling out time cards and expense reports. If you are a supervisor, you do the same, PLUS you review your crew's time cards and expense reports. If you are a project manager, you have all of this, plus you may have regular progress reports and budgeting paperwork.
If I am on a project for more than a week, it is not uncommon for me to return from the field with a binder (or multiple binders) filled with forms and records.
Is it Worth It?
This is, of course, subjective. I have seen people burn out quickly, and decide to go back to school to become lawyers, or take a job in the administration of a local tech company, etc. etc. etc. So, for them, it wasn't worth it.
For me, it has been worth it. For all of the frustrations that I have experienced, and I have had some severe frustrations, I have been fairly happy with my career choice. I have been able to go to some amazing places and see some wonderful things, and meet some interesting people. And if I sometimes spend too much time in a shithole, well, that's the trade off for the good times. While I don't get paid as well as my friends who work in the tech industry, I don't have the stability of the friends and family who have gone into law, and my life isn't as adventurous as a friend of mine who travels Africa doing rather important agricultural work, it still suits me rather well, and I enjoy my job more often than not.
But this line of work is not for everyone. I does have a low financial payoff, a lot of stresses, frequent instability (depending on the construction industry's activities), and a lot of areas of conflict. But every career has its downsides, and the upsides are sufficient to keep me satisfied.
*There is, of course, and exception to this. There are volunteer archaeology programs that will teach people how to perform basic fieldwork, and there are programs that allow people to pay archaeologists to accompany them on projects. These are of variable quality, and they can be an entry-point into archaeology, but none of them will carry you very far in and of themselves.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
"Oh, well, at least we're better than literary critics!"
Back in the 90s, when Newt Gingrich was still Speaker of the House, he made a speech in which he ranted about government waste (as he was wont to do), and specifically, in this one speech, he argued against government funding for science. His argument was that the government should not be funding research undertaken purely to satisfy a scientist's curiosity*.
Flash forward ten years...
When I was in graduate school, I took the last graduate seminar class offered by Brian Fagan. Brian, being the sort of person that he was, liked to challenge the student's assumptions about their own importance, and the importance of their chosen field. Unsurprisingly, most of us graduate students tended to take the earth-shaking importance of archaeology as a given, with little thought as to whether or not our assumptions about the importance of our field of study were, in fact, justified. Just as unsurprisingly, most of us also held that our own little corner of that field, the focus of our research and interests, was of vital importance to the whole.
I was a little different. Of the students in the room, I was one of only two who had held any sort of long-term employment outside of academics. I was, in short, one of only two who held any idea of what the world outside of our particular enclave actually thought of what we were doing**.
Brian, staring at each of us in turn, asked why we thought that non-archaeologists should consider archaeology to be important. When he got to me, I responded "well, because we assume it is. I can give a list of justifications for studying archaeology, but unless the person with whom I am speaking shares my basic assumptions, they're not going to be persuaded by any of them."
Needless to say, this earned me a round of derisive laughter and annoyed glares...by everyone except the one other guy who had been outside of academics, and, interestingly, Brian.
the next week, Brian threw a question out to the class, asking what we figured we should be doing to gain and/or maintain public interest in archaeology. While a few of the other students talked about various public outreach measures (some of which were quite intelligent, others were pretty uninspiring), most simply stated that we should keep on just doing research and not worrying about it.
It was at this point that I remembered the Newt Gingrich speech that I mentioned at the beginning. And I brought this up, pointing out that a high elected official had found this type of argument (trying to get rid of research funding by appealing to cost-cutting and phrasing it in a rather anti-intellectual way) pretty effective, and that it indicated that there was a sizable, if currently minority, segment of the public that actually disliked the fact that archaeologists received public funding int he form of research grants.
One particular graduate student, I'll call her Jesse (because it would likely annoy her to know that I was using such a plain, "common" name for her), rolled her eye, and said "there is no reason why we should have to justify ourselves to a bunch of uneducated fools who don't even have the brains to understand what we're doing anyway."
I pointed out that in taking this attitude, she was ceding the public discussion to the people who wanted to reduce of entirely stop funding for archaeological research, and that this attitude that the lay public was somehow too stupid to understand what we were doing, but should continue to fund us anyway, was (in addition to being arrogant, wrong-headed, and just plain incorrect) one of the factors feeding the anti-intellectualism that many politicians depend on. If we were so arrogant that we didn't think that we needed to defend what we did, then we were essentially ceding the field to those who would like us defunded, and while it might take decades, they would eventually win.
She rolled her eyes at me, as she tended to do to anyone who was a lowly MA student and not on the PhD track. The then re-asserted that the general public was too stupid to understand her work, but that they would continue to fund it because it was so obviously important.
Brian seemed to be enjoying this, and so her went from looking rather bored earlier in the day to looking intensely interested.
I pointed out to her that the research that Gingrich had been making hay by bashing was in fields such as genetics, chemistry, and physics, all of which have much more direct benefits to the public, and much easier to grasp reasons to fund. Jesse again rolled her eyes, and shouted "oh, well, you can go ahead and waste your time with the idiots! I have more important things to do! And if you think we're going to get defunded, oh, well, at least we're better than literary critics! They don't produce ANYTHING!"
And with that, Brian called the symposium to a close. The next day, he asked me to talk to him in his office, and he announced that he was rather happy to see someone actually going against the grain and trying to inject a bit of reality. So, it was nice to know that someone valued my opinion.
At the time, as stated, I was in the MA track, but I had the potential to switch to a PhD. There are a few specific events that convinced me not to pursue the higher degree, though, and this was one of them. I value research, and obviously I think that archaeology is a valuable field to pursue. But I am also aware that I hold these beliefs based on a particular value system to which I adhere, and while I believe that it is a valid and strong value system, I am very well aware that I live in a society where elected officials hold a good deal of sway over what does and does not receive funding, and that the decisions that these officials make are based on a number of factors, one of the larger ones being what they believe either their voters want or they can convince their constituents to support.
To not try to let the public know what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it is for us, as a field, to commit suicide. Indeed, the fact that a fellow academic was so ready to dismiss those who work in literary criticism shows both the snottiness of some archaeologists, but also where failing to defend a field gets you - there are many good reasons to study literature and literary criticism, many of which have very real consequences in the world (the literary critics that I know have often been the best at spotting political smoke-and-mirrors and working to expose it, after all, they understand narratives, which is what politicians generate), but these are rarely expressed in forums where the general public hears them. As a result, literary criticism is often viewed as little more than intellectual masturbation by those outside the academy, regardless of how valuable it may actually be. Similarly, the general public may believe that archaeology is valid now, but after a generation or two of politicians and pundits decrying government funding for research, it will be difficult to defend continued funding (or laws requiring archaeological review for construction) if people who value archaeology are not vocally showing their support and trying to win out in the intellectual marketplace that is the public sphere.
What's more, when academics of any stripe assume that the "general public" is too stupid to understand research, they not only underestimate the general public, they justify one of the great rhetorical weapons that the anti-intellectuals and those who for other reasons want to cut funding have: they can point to researchers as being self-indulgent snobs with no regard for the common people. It's an effective tactic, one that has worked before. We have to be better not only at defending ourselves, but also humbler when doing so. And it is entirely possible to defend research work without dumbing it down. Brian Fagan is quite good at this, as was Carl Sagan and his successor, Niel DeGrasse-Tyson. But we have to understand that this is necessary, and be ready and willing to do it.
If we don't, then perhaps we deserve the professional extinction that we will face.
*I will argue about the problems with such an attitude another time. For now, I will simply say that it is, from an economic and technological standpoint, a very short-sided position to take.
**I will not, however, refer to the world outside of the university as "the real world" partially because that's the sort of thing that only condescending assholes do, and partially because one of the most important lessons I learned in the business world before returning to graduate school was that there is no "real world", the people in business face a particular set of challenges and adversities that people in academics don't, but they are equally sheltered from a variety of challenges and adversities that people in academics have to deal with. And pretty much everyone living in affluent nations is sheltered, to some degree, from the "real world" outside of our comfort zones. So, if you are the sort of person who thinks that you know what it's like "out int he real world" you are probably just as sheltered as the people who you look down upon.
Flash forward ten years...
When I was in graduate school, I took the last graduate seminar class offered by Brian Fagan. Brian, being the sort of person that he was, liked to challenge the student's assumptions about their own importance, and the importance of their chosen field. Unsurprisingly, most of us graduate students tended to take the earth-shaking importance of archaeology as a given, with little thought as to whether or not our assumptions about the importance of our field of study were, in fact, justified. Just as unsurprisingly, most of us also held that our own little corner of that field, the focus of our research and interests, was of vital importance to the whole.
I was a little different. Of the students in the room, I was one of only two who had held any sort of long-term employment outside of academics. I was, in short, one of only two who held any idea of what the world outside of our particular enclave actually thought of what we were doing**.
Brian, staring at each of us in turn, asked why we thought that non-archaeologists should consider archaeology to be important. When he got to me, I responded "well, because we assume it is. I can give a list of justifications for studying archaeology, but unless the person with whom I am speaking shares my basic assumptions, they're not going to be persuaded by any of them."
Needless to say, this earned me a round of derisive laughter and annoyed glares...by everyone except the one other guy who had been outside of academics, and, interestingly, Brian.
the next week, Brian threw a question out to the class, asking what we figured we should be doing to gain and/or maintain public interest in archaeology. While a few of the other students talked about various public outreach measures (some of which were quite intelligent, others were pretty uninspiring), most simply stated that we should keep on just doing research and not worrying about it.
It was at this point that I remembered the Newt Gingrich speech that I mentioned at the beginning. And I brought this up, pointing out that a high elected official had found this type of argument (trying to get rid of research funding by appealing to cost-cutting and phrasing it in a rather anti-intellectual way) pretty effective, and that it indicated that there was a sizable, if currently minority, segment of the public that actually disliked the fact that archaeologists received public funding int he form of research grants.
One particular graduate student, I'll call her Jesse (because it would likely annoy her to know that I was using such a plain, "common" name for her), rolled her eye, and said "there is no reason why we should have to justify ourselves to a bunch of uneducated fools who don't even have the brains to understand what we're doing anyway."
I pointed out that in taking this attitude, she was ceding the public discussion to the people who wanted to reduce of entirely stop funding for archaeological research, and that this attitude that the lay public was somehow too stupid to understand what we were doing, but should continue to fund us anyway, was (in addition to being arrogant, wrong-headed, and just plain incorrect) one of the factors feeding the anti-intellectualism that many politicians depend on. If we were so arrogant that we didn't think that we needed to defend what we did, then we were essentially ceding the field to those who would like us defunded, and while it might take decades, they would eventually win.
She rolled her eyes at me, as she tended to do to anyone who was a lowly MA student and not on the PhD track. The then re-asserted that the general public was too stupid to understand her work, but that they would continue to fund it because it was so obviously important.
Brian seemed to be enjoying this, and so her went from looking rather bored earlier in the day to looking intensely interested.
I pointed out to her that the research that Gingrich had been making hay by bashing was in fields such as genetics, chemistry, and physics, all of which have much more direct benefits to the public, and much easier to grasp reasons to fund. Jesse again rolled her eyes, and shouted "oh, well, you can go ahead and waste your time with the idiots! I have more important things to do! And if you think we're going to get defunded, oh, well, at least we're better than literary critics! They don't produce ANYTHING!"
And with that, Brian called the symposium to a close. The next day, he asked me to talk to him in his office, and he announced that he was rather happy to see someone actually going against the grain and trying to inject a bit of reality. So, it was nice to know that someone valued my opinion.
At the time, as stated, I was in the MA track, but I had the potential to switch to a PhD. There are a few specific events that convinced me not to pursue the higher degree, though, and this was one of them. I value research, and obviously I think that archaeology is a valuable field to pursue. But I am also aware that I hold these beliefs based on a particular value system to which I adhere, and while I believe that it is a valid and strong value system, I am very well aware that I live in a society where elected officials hold a good deal of sway over what does and does not receive funding, and that the decisions that these officials make are based on a number of factors, one of the larger ones being what they believe either their voters want or they can convince their constituents to support.
To not try to let the public know what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it is for us, as a field, to commit suicide. Indeed, the fact that a fellow academic was so ready to dismiss those who work in literary criticism shows both the snottiness of some archaeologists, but also where failing to defend a field gets you - there are many good reasons to study literature and literary criticism, many of which have very real consequences in the world (the literary critics that I know have often been the best at spotting political smoke-and-mirrors and working to expose it, after all, they understand narratives, which is what politicians generate), but these are rarely expressed in forums where the general public hears them. As a result, literary criticism is often viewed as little more than intellectual masturbation by those outside the academy, regardless of how valuable it may actually be. Similarly, the general public may believe that archaeology is valid now, but after a generation or two of politicians and pundits decrying government funding for research, it will be difficult to defend continued funding (or laws requiring archaeological review for construction) if people who value archaeology are not vocally showing their support and trying to win out in the intellectual marketplace that is the public sphere.
What's more, when academics of any stripe assume that the "general public" is too stupid to understand research, they not only underestimate the general public, they justify one of the great rhetorical weapons that the anti-intellectuals and those who for other reasons want to cut funding have: they can point to researchers as being self-indulgent snobs with no regard for the common people. It's an effective tactic, one that has worked before. We have to be better not only at defending ourselves, but also humbler when doing so. And it is entirely possible to defend research work without dumbing it down. Brian Fagan is quite good at this, as was Carl Sagan and his successor, Niel DeGrasse-Tyson. But we have to understand that this is necessary, and be ready and willing to do it.
If we don't, then perhaps we deserve the professional extinction that we will face.
*I will argue about the problems with such an attitude another time. For now, I will simply say that it is, from an economic and technological standpoint, a very short-sided position to take.
**I will not, however, refer to the world outside of the university as "the real world" partially because that's the sort of thing that only condescending assholes do, and partially because one of the most important lessons I learned in the business world before returning to graduate school was that there is no "real world", the people in business face a particular set of challenges and adversities that people in academics don't, but they are equally sheltered from a variety of challenges and adversities that people in academics have to deal with. And pretty much everyone living in affluent nations is sheltered, to some degree, from the "real world" outside of our comfort zones. So, if you are the sort of person who thinks that you know what it's like "out int he real world" you are probably just as sheltered as the people who you look down upon.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Osteology Software Buying Blues
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class on human skeletal biology. The class was difficult*, and I was always on the lookout for anything that might help me out. To that end, one day, I headed to the local Software Etc. store**, thinking that, seeing as they were in a college town and did stock some educational software, they might have something that would be helpful.
I walked in, approached the counter, and explained to the guy standing there (the employee, not some random customer trying to buy his software) that I was an anthropology student, and was looking for educational software that covered human anatomy in general, and bone in particular.
the guy behind the counter - I am tempted to say "kid behind the counter" but he wouldn't have been much younger than me back then - snorted, and said "they weren't human."
A bit confused by his answer, I said something extraordinarily witty, like "huh?"
In about as condescending a tone as the little twit could muster he said "You said your an anthropology student. You don't study humans. You study those monkey things. Even if we have the software, it wouldn't help you."
I attempted to explain that anthropology was the study of humans - modern and otherwise - in general, and yes, I was looking for software on the anatomy of modern humans. His response? "No, you're looking at like Lucy and stuff.
I was flummoxed. On the one hand, I was trying to spend money in this guy's store, and his attitude was making it difficult for me to justify doing so, much less actually do it. On the other hand, I was an anthropology student, he had clearly never taken an anthropology class and didn't know anything about it, and I was clear in what I was looking for and that it would cover modern humans, and he was still insisting that somehow I was the one that didn't know what I was talking about.
I finally said "Look, I know what I am looking for, you obviously don't. I am studying the bones of modern humans, and I am looking for software that can help me study."
He snorted again, gave me a disdainful look, and said "Lucy wasn't a human."
I stared at him with irritation and said "depends on what you mean by human, but that's beside the point, because I am studying the bones of people walking around in the world today."
He rolled his eyes, gestured towards a rack of programs and said "there might be something over there."
I looked over, and then turned and walked out.
To this day, some sixteen years later, I still find myself wondering about why this guy had such an attitude. Was he simply one of those arrogantly ignorant fucks who is sure that he is the master of all sorts of specialized knowledge when he actually knows very little about, well, anything? Was he a creationist who was upset with the findings of paleoanthropologists and therefore wanted to show up one of them only showing his own ignorance in the process? Was he just a disagreeable ass who was unwilling to admit that his initial assumptions were wrong even as it became increasingly obvious that they were?
I don't know. What I do know is that that was the last time I ever walked into a Software Etc.
*Though in the end, I received either an A or B, I forget which.
**This was back when Software Etc., which has since merged with another store and become Gamestop, stocked a wide range of software, not just games. As odd as looking for something this specialized there might sound, they did sometimes have such specialized programs.
I walked in, approached the counter, and explained to the guy standing there (the employee, not some random customer trying to buy his software) that I was an anthropology student, and was looking for educational software that covered human anatomy in general, and bone in particular.
the guy behind the counter - I am tempted to say "kid behind the counter" but he wouldn't have been much younger than me back then - snorted, and said "they weren't human."
A bit confused by his answer, I said something extraordinarily witty, like "huh?"
In about as condescending a tone as the little twit could muster he said "You said your an anthropology student. You don't study humans. You study those monkey things. Even if we have the software, it wouldn't help you."
I attempted to explain that anthropology was the study of humans - modern and otherwise - in general, and yes, I was looking for software on the anatomy of modern humans. His response? "No, you're looking at like Lucy and stuff.
I was flummoxed. On the one hand, I was trying to spend money in this guy's store, and his attitude was making it difficult for me to justify doing so, much less actually do it. On the other hand, I was an anthropology student, he had clearly never taken an anthropology class and didn't know anything about it, and I was clear in what I was looking for and that it would cover modern humans, and he was still insisting that somehow I was the one that didn't know what I was talking about.
I finally said "Look, I know what I am looking for, you obviously don't. I am studying the bones of modern humans, and I am looking for software that can help me study."
He snorted again, gave me a disdainful look, and said "Lucy wasn't a human."
I stared at him with irritation and said "depends on what you mean by human, but that's beside the point, because I am studying the bones of people walking around in the world today."
He rolled his eyes, gestured towards a rack of programs and said "there might be something over there."
I looked over, and then turned and walked out.
To this day, some sixteen years later, I still find myself wondering about why this guy had such an attitude. Was he simply one of those arrogantly ignorant fucks who is sure that he is the master of all sorts of specialized knowledge when he actually knows very little about, well, anything? Was he a creationist who was upset with the findings of paleoanthropologists and therefore wanted to show up one of them only showing his own ignorance in the process? Was he just a disagreeable ass who was unwilling to admit that his initial assumptions were wrong even as it became increasingly obvious that they were?
I don't know. What I do know is that that was the last time I ever walked into a Software Etc.
*Though in the end, I received either an A or B, I forget which.
**This was back when Software Etc., which has since merged with another store and become Gamestop, stocked a wide range of software, not just games. As odd as looking for something this specialized there might sound, they did sometimes have such specialized programs.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Apparently Yes, I can HAZWOPER
So, as noted in the previous entry, I have had to attend a class to get a certification that allows me to work with hazardous waste.
I passed.
Yes, that's right, I am now authorized to work with hazardous waste. Do not be alarmed. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
Unlike the previous week, most of what we went over this last, and thankfully final, weekend was at least somewhat applicable to my job, and therefore much more worthwhile. Which isn't to say that it was any fun, because it wasn't. Still, it's over, and a few amusing things did happen over the course of the weekend.
The safety personnel from Hazard Safety Services Incorporated continued to show that they considered this class to be a joke, disrupting with smart-ass comments and continuously providing stupid answers to the instructor's questions, which means that I will walk off of any site that these guys are responsible for - if your safety people don't take their training seriously, then the shit will hit the fan on one of their sites eventually, and it is best not to be present for that. On the up-side, the instructor did make one of their number, the guy who I had taken to referring to as "Princess Diana", do laps around the classroom while wearing a full class-A hazmat suit, and pressing down on the twit's shoulders. He later threatened to duct-tape and taze the kid.
Unfortunately, when Princess Diana quieted down, one of his buddies picked up and began rambling about zombies and 2012 end-of-the-world nonsense. So, the irritation continued to flow.
On Saturday, I walked through a group of fellow students who were having an in-depth conversation about their time in prison. One of these guys later interrupted the class to inform everyone that the reason why Harold Camping's Rapture prediction was wrong was because "if Camping was telling the truth, it would make Jesus a liar, and that can't be man, because..." and then he began trying to preach at us until the instructor, who you may remember looks like a hybrid of a professional wrestler/Hell's Angel/hipster/driver's ed. instructor gave him a glare that made the guy shut up. Later that same day, the same guy also, appropo of nothing, decided to shout out that non-dairy creamer is flammable. He later tried to disrupt the class again to talk about contracting Valley Fever while in Prison.
I wonder what it's like to be in prison and have Tourette's.
All the while, there was an umkempt, greasy fellow who looked for all the world like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. On the first day, the previous week, he had tried to impress me with his interest in "morally ambiguous" characters in literature, but quickly showed that he was far more interested in the cartoonish violence doled out by such characters when they appear in Conan-derived fantasy novels. This week he decided that we were buddies, and spent the weekend trying to regale me with stories to show how cool he was, but all of which were plainly bullshit - my favorite was a story about a buddy of his who "is in the Marines, a special anti-terrorist taskforce, who had a gun pulled on Osama Bin Laden, was only ten feet away, but his commanding officer ordered him to let Bin Laden go!"* He then spent some time pestering me to try to get me to hire him as an "archaeologist's assistant." This was when he wasn't rambling on about movies, comic books, or other entertainment that I didn't care about, and about which he would continue to ramble at me even after I had informed him in no uncertain terms that I didn't care. He also took to cracking fart jokes at every opportunity. I began to spend my breaks pretending to answer email on my phone or else hidden away just to avoid this guy.
Through all of this, the instructor continued to be an imposing and amusing figure. In addition to his tormenting the HSSI morons, he also informed us of how to dispose of a body if working in the oil fields, discussed the bomb shelter that he owns in Montana, and just generally made himself a weird, amusing character who I would swear was made up by a hack writer if I hadn't seen him. He also had a dimple on the back of his head, which might be where his keepers plug him in at night.
Oh, and in case you feel safer knowing that people working with hazardous waste have this training - they spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out the boiling point of a flammable solid. Oh, and one of them, I believe it was the would-be preacher, began to tell the instructor about how, if a federal official "disrespected" him, he'd attack the federal official, and seemed genuinely surprised when he was told that this would get him arrested.
Yeah, real brain trusts here.
Oh, and I was put in charge of a field exercise because I was the only person in the class who both had supervisory experience and did not have anger control problems.
Sleep tight America, your hazardous materials are in safe hands.
And it wasn't just the class that was strange. While walking out onto the lawn during a break, a fellow in an orange safety shirt ran by, ran out onto the lawn, dropped onto all fours, and then began moving in a manner that can only be described as dry-humping the air. At my hotel, some random guy walked up to me and wanted to ask my opinion of St. Louis, Missouri politics and the current weather problems there, which would have made sense if A) I had ever met this guy, and B) I knew anything about the subject or said/did something to imply that I did...as neither of these is the case, it was just odd.
At any rate, I am now certified, and don't have to go back for a couple years. If I keep my certification up, then I only have to go back for 8 hours.
*Now, don't get me wrong. As weird as the notion of Bin Laden being let go sounds, historically, equally strange things have happened. So, if 20 years down the road evidence comes out that this sort of thing occurred, I'd be surprised, but not overly shocked. I just really doubt that this guy's ever-so-bestest friend from high school was the one who had him.
I passed.
Yes, that's right, I am now authorized to work with hazardous waste. Do not be alarmed. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.
Unlike the previous week, most of what we went over this last, and thankfully final, weekend was at least somewhat applicable to my job, and therefore much more worthwhile. Which isn't to say that it was any fun, because it wasn't. Still, it's over, and a few amusing things did happen over the course of the weekend.
The safety personnel from Hazard Safety Services Incorporated continued to show that they considered this class to be a joke, disrupting with smart-ass comments and continuously providing stupid answers to the instructor's questions, which means that I will walk off of any site that these guys are responsible for - if your safety people don't take their training seriously, then the shit will hit the fan on one of their sites eventually, and it is best not to be present for that. On the up-side, the instructor did make one of their number, the guy who I had taken to referring to as "Princess Diana", do laps around the classroom while wearing a full class-A hazmat suit, and pressing down on the twit's shoulders. He later threatened to duct-tape and taze the kid.
Class A Hazmat Suit
Unfortunately, when Princess Diana quieted down, one of his buddies picked up and began rambling about zombies and 2012 end-of-the-world nonsense. So, the irritation continued to flow.
On Saturday, I walked through a group of fellow students who were having an in-depth conversation about their time in prison. One of these guys later interrupted the class to inform everyone that the reason why Harold Camping's Rapture prediction was wrong was because "if Camping was telling the truth, it would make Jesus a liar, and that can't be man, because..." and then he began trying to preach at us until the instructor, who you may remember looks like a hybrid of a professional wrestler/Hell's Angel/hipster/driver's ed. instructor gave him a glare that made the guy shut up. Later that same day, the same guy also, appropo of nothing, decided to shout out that non-dairy creamer is flammable. He later tried to disrupt the class again to talk about contracting Valley Fever while in Prison.
I wonder what it's like to be in prison and have Tourette's.
All the while, there was an umkempt, greasy fellow who looked for all the world like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. On the first day, the previous week, he had tried to impress me with his interest in "morally ambiguous" characters in literature, but quickly showed that he was far more interested in the cartoonish violence doled out by such characters when they appear in Conan-derived fantasy novels. This week he decided that we were buddies, and spent the weekend trying to regale me with stories to show how cool he was, but all of which were plainly bullshit - my favorite was a story about a buddy of his who "is in the Marines, a special anti-terrorist taskforce, who had a gun pulled on Osama Bin Laden, was only ten feet away, but his commanding officer ordered him to let Bin Laden go!"* He then spent some time pestering me to try to get me to hire him as an "archaeologist's assistant." This was when he wasn't rambling on about movies, comic books, or other entertainment that I didn't care about, and about which he would continue to ramble at me even after I had informed him in no uncertain terms that I didn't care. He also took to cracking fart jokes at every opportunity. I began to spend my breaks pretending to answer email on my phone or else hidden away just to avoid this guy.
Through all of this, the instructor continued to be an imposing and amusing figure. In addition to his tormenting the HSSI morons, he also informed us of how to dispose of a body if working in the oil fields, discussed the bomb shelter that he owns in Montana, and just generally made himself a weird, amusing character who I would swear was made up by a hack writer if I hadn't seen him. He also had a dimple on the back of his head, which might be where his keepers plug him in at night.
Oh, and in case you feel safer knowing that people working with hazardous waste have this training - they spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out the boiling point of a flammable solid. Oh, and one of them, I believe it was the would-be preacher, began to tell the instructor about how, if a federal official "disrespected" him, he'd attack the federal official, and seemed genuinely surprised when he was told that this would get him arrested.
Yeah, real brain trusts here.
Oh, and I was put in charge of a field exercise because I was the only person in the class who both had supervisory experience and did not have anger control problems.
Sleep tight America, your hazardous materials are in safe hands.
And it wasn't just the class that was strange. While walking out onto the lawn during a break, a fellow in an orange safety shirt ran by, ran out onto the lawn, dropped onto all fours, and then began moving in a manner that can only be described as dry-humping the air. At my hotel, some random guy walked up to me and wanted to ask my opinion of St. Louis, Missouri politics and the current weather problems there, which would have made sense if A) I had ever met this guy, and B) I knew anything about the subject or said/did something to imply that I did...as neither of these is the case, it was just odd.
At any rate, I am now certified, and don't have to go back for a couple years. If I keep my certification up, then I only have to go back for 8 hours.
*Now, don't get me wrong. As weird as the notion of Bin Laden being let go sounds, historically, equally strange things have happened. So, if 20 years down the road evidence comes out that this sort of thing occurred, I'd be surprised, but not overly shocked. I just really doubt that this guy's ever-so-bestest friend from high school was the one who had him.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
What's in a Master's Degree?
While at the SAAs last week, I got to speaking with people about the interesting phenomonon of archaeologists from the U.S. going over to the U.K. for their Masters degrees. The reason for this is that there are numerous Masters programs in the U.K. that can be completed in a year, whereas the normative time to degree in the U.S. is, depending on the program, between 2.5 and 5 years. The reason for the difference is that the U.S. MA in anthropology typically requires a larger amount of coursework, ideally preparing the student for the wide range of issues that they will confront as a professional archaeologist. As a result, 1-year U.K. Master's degrees are often looked down upon by North American archaeologists. However, I think that this is done without actually considering whether or not U.S. programs are any better.
First off, there's a fair bit of ambiguity regarding how, precisely, one earns a Master's degree. There are, of course, programs that simply offer Master's degrees. Some of these programs are aimed at producing CRM professionals (a great example being Sonoma State's program), while others are research-degrees geared towards moving a student into a PhD program. Someone who emerges from Sonoma State is much more likely to have a firm grasp on how to perform CRM than someone from a research-oriented program, but the person from the research-oriented program may be better able to incorporate new research into the work produced by a CRM firm. So, it's a trade-off.
There are, however, also Master's programs that offer a degree, but which produce neither a CRM professional nor a researcher. These tend to be, as far as I have been able to determine, modeled on MA programs for different trades, but with no real concept of the business of archaeology. As a result, there are people with MAs in archaeology and anthropology who know no more about the subjects than one would expect an advanced undergraduate to.
And then there's the matter of PhD programs that don't offer Master's degrees as such, but will award them to students who have completed the first two-to-three years of training in a PhD program, regardless of whether they complete the PhD itself. My graduate school, UC Santa Barbara, offered both a Master's track and a PhD track, where most students attended the same classes, did the same projects, etc., until the end of the second year, when the Master's students went off to work on their theses, and the PhD students wrote a "data paper" in preparation for working on their dissertations. The majority of the students who don't finish their PhD but are granted Master's degrees are competent, and I have no problem with sharing a title with them.
However, there is always a chance of someone slipping through. I remember one fellow who came in during my third year, I'll call him Gonzo, who was barely capable of tying his own shoes, much less doing independent resaearch or running a project. He managed to squeak through classes, and managed to complete his comprehensive exams (which all of the graduate students were required to take), and then was gently nudged out of the program by the faculty. Upon leaving, he was granted a Master's degree.
Meanwhile, the other Master's students and I had completed all of the classes with a minimum of an "A" in each class, passed our comprehensive exams, designed and executed a research project, and produced a Master's thesis (mine clocked in at over 250 pages) in order earn our degrees. So, even at the same insitution, there were two decidedly unequal ways of earning a Master's degree.
So, there is a lot of variability as far as how well gaining a Master's degree prepares a person for a job as an archaeologist.
With this in mind, the notion that the 1-year Master's programs in the U.K. are somehow inferior strikes me as being rather weird. I believe that I was better prepared than a 1-year student would be, and that someone from Sonoma State is better prepared than me. However, I have met numerous people who were certainly no better off with a U.S. Master's degree from a poor program (or as a consolation prize after missing the PhD) than someone with a 1-year degree would have been. In fact, from what I have seen of the 1-year programs in England, I would place them above some of the U.S. programs that I am familiar with.
First off, there's a fair bit of ambiguity regarding how, precisely, one earns a Master's degree. There are, of course, programs that simply offer Master's degrees. Some of these programs are aimed at producing CRM professionals (a great example being Sonoma State's program), while others are research-degrees geared towards moving a student into a PhD program. Someone who emerges from Sonoma State is much more likely to have a firm grasp on how to perform CRM than someone from a research-oriented program, but the person from the research-oriented program may be better able to incorporate new research into the work produced by a CRM firm. So, it's a trade-off.
There are, however, also Master's programs that offer a degree, but which produce neither a CRM professional nor a researcher. These tend to be, as far as I have been able to determine, modeled on MA programs for different trades, but with no real concept of the business of archaeology. As a result, there are people with MAs in archaeology and anthropology who know no more about the subjects than one would expect an advanced undergraduate to.
And then there's the matter of PhD programs that don't offer Master's degrees as such, but will award them to students who have completed the first two-to-three years of training in a PhD program, regardless of whether they complete the PhD itself. My graduate school, UC Santa Barbara, offered both a Master's track and a PhD track, where most students attended the same classes, did the same projects, etc., until the end of the second year, when the Master's students went off to work on their theses, and the PhD students wrote a "data paper" in preparation for working on their dissertations. The majority of the students who don't finish their PhD but are granted Master's degrees are competent, and I have no problem with sharing a title with them.
However, there is always a chance of someone slipping through. I remember one fellow who came in during my third year, I'll call him Gonzo, who was barely capable of tying his own shoes, much less doing independent resaearch or running a project. He managed to squeak through classes, and managed to complete his comprehensive exams (which all of the graduate students were required to take), and then was gently nudged out of the program by the faculty. Upon leaving, he was granted a Master's degree.
Meanwhile, the other Master's students and I had completed all of the classes with a minimum of an "A" in each class, passed our comprehensive exams, designed and executed a research project, and produced a Master's thesis (mine clocked in at over 250 pages) in order earn our degrees. So, even at the same insitution, there were two decidedly unequal ways of earning a Master's degree.
So, there is a lot of variability as far as how well gaining a Master's degree prepares a person for a job as an archaeologist.
With this in mind, the notion that the 1-year Master's programs in the U.K. are somehow inferior strikes me as being rather weird. I believe that I was better prepared than a 1-year student would be, and that someone from Sonoma State is better prepared than me. However, I have met numerous people who were certainly no better off with a U.S. Master's degree from a poor program (or as a consolation prize after missing the PhD) than someone with a 1-year degree would have been. In fact, from what I have seen of the 1-year programs in England, I would place them above some of the U.S. programs that I am familiar with.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Passing Giants
As described in the previous post, I spent the weekend at the Society for California Archaeology conference. It was generally a great experience, but there was one melancholoy note to the whole thing.
I spent some time talking with Michael Glassow, my graduate advisor, who has now retired. I also spent the better part of an afternoon talking with Rob Edwards, who taught me how to do fieldwork and is also now retired. Rob and I spoke about Don and Roberta Lenkeit, my first anthropology instructors, also retired. As the weekend went on, I spoke with several of the other people who have either directly trained me or who loom like giants over Californian archaeology (often both), and others who knew these people, and the story was the same for every person I could think of who is iconic in the region or personally important to me - they are either retired, nearing retirement, or likely will start planning for retirement in the next ten or so years. I realized that I was witnessing the passing of giants.
To be certain, they leave in their wake a legacy of fine archaeologists who themselves have become or are becoming the new giants. Michael Glassow, for one example, has been the mentor to Lynn Gamble, Terry Joslin, John Johnson, Dustin MacKenzie, and Jeanne Arnold, just to name a few off of the very long and impressive list. There are times when it feels as if Rob Edwards field trained half the archaeologists working in the western United States. These descendant archaeologists, myself among them, are different from our elders, but they were different from their elders as well. The chain continues on, progress is made, but continuity is kept.
Still, it's somewhat sad to see these archaeologists, all of whom have left tremendous marks on the field, pass into retirement (though some of them continue to produce work even in retirement). They've worked hard, and deserve to spend this time however they please, but I miss looking forward to seeing what they do next. And it is hard not to feel very small in their wake.
However, in conversations I had with them over the weekend, they often brought up their own teachers, all of whom have long since passed. It was clear that they were aware of their own differences from those who came before them, and often felt as if they were quite small in comparison. Several times over the weekend, I heard my former teachers mention that they felt that their teachers had been Renaissance men, colorful characters, and exemplary scholars whose example they found it difficult to live up to. And yet, my teachers took archaeology as a field to new heights, learned things that their teachers would have thought impossible, and very much lived up to the standards left for them.
The generation that taught my teachers had been brought up in archaeology during a time when it was more tightly integrated into both ethnography and history, and were from a generation where a well-rounded individual knew their profession as well as how to do a variety of other things (build a house, write a poem, care for animals, etc. etc.), and these facts were frequently brought up when my teachers wanted to illustrate what had been lost. Of course, my teachers were themselves more than simply diggers. They may not have engaged in ethnography and linguistics like their teachers did, but they tied archaeology more closely to robust methods, put an emphasis on making bridging arguments between the materials taken out of the ground and the conclusions drawn from them, they began the steps to bring archaeologists and local communities closer together, and they emphasized to their students the importance of leaving one's ego at the door and following the data.
And my teachers were, and are, of course colorful characters who loom larger-than-life in the eyes of their students. Even the most accomplished of us feels disappointment when they disapprove of our work, and a sense of satisfaction when they praise our work.
And, of course, when we compare ourselves to our mentors, it seems that we will find ourselves wanting. We lack their decades of experience, though we will gain it one day. Importantly, we are also different. Their mentors were shaped by WWII, the Depression, the Labor Movement, and the desire to make life normal, and (as there were few women among that generation of archaeologists) to live up to a particular measure of masculinity (as Rob Edwards describes it, contrary to the "loony left" faculty that is so often described, the anthropology faculty of 1960s/70s UC Davis was politically and socially conservative, if not reactionary). So to were my mentors shaped by the social unrest of the 60s, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the strangeness of the 1980s. They are no less men (still, in that generation, relatively few women in archaeology) of their times than their mentors had been before them.
While at the SCAs, I ran into several people who I taught to do lab work, or trained in the field. Do I figure in their minds the way my teachers figure in mine? I don't know. Probably not, though, as I am not primarily a teacher. But I do know that Dustin MacKenzie's students view him in the same way I view Rob. Lynn Gamble's students view her in much the same way that I view Michael Glassow. And my archaeology is different than that of my teachers, just as their was different from their teachers. I have to be part archaeologist, part businessman, and part regulatory specialist. Dustin has to be a teacher and entertainer as much as he is an archaeologist. I have friends in government positions who have to be regulators and enforcement just as much as archaeologists. We are all wearing many hats, but we are all still part of the same continuum that contains our predecessors and theirs. And while Vietnam and WWII are history to me, my generation has been shaped by computers, the Internet, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic decline, and needlessly polarized political discourse. We are products of our time as surely as the previous generations were products of theirs. This will influence our archaeology just as the social contexts of the past influenced the archaeology of the past.
Still, as much as I try to pump myself up, it's hard not to see this as a period in which giants are passing from the Earth, and wonder if my generation will measure up. I suppose that's for the next generation of archaeologists to decide.
I spent some time talking with Michael Glassow, my graduate advisor, who has now retired. I also spent the better part of an afternoon talking with Rob Edwards, who taught me how to do fieldwork and is also now retired. Rob and I spoke about Don and Roberta Lenkeit, my first anthropology instructors, also retired. As the weekend went on, I spoke with several of the other people who have either directly trained me or who loom like giants over Californian archaeology (often both), and others who knew these people, and the story was the same for every person I could think of who is iconic in the region or personally important to me - they are either retired, nearing retirement, or likely will start planning for retirement in the next ten or so years. I realized that I was witnessing the passing of giants.
To be certain, they leave in their wake a legacy of fine archaeologists who themselves have become or are becoming the new giants. Michael Glassow, for one example, has been the mentor to Lynn Gamble, Terry Joslin, John Johnson, Dustin MacKenzie, and Jeanne Arnold, just to name a few off of the very long and impressive list. There are times when it feels as if Rob Edwards field trained half the archaeologists working in the western United States. These descendant archaeologists, myself among them, are different from our elders, but they were different from their elders as well. The chain continues on, progress is made, but continuity is kept.
Still, it's somewhat sad to see these archaeologists, all of whom have left tremendous marks on the field, pass into retirement (though some of them continue to produce work even in retirement). They've worked hard, and deserve to spend this time however they please, but I miss looking forward to seeing what they do next. And it is hard not to feel very small in their wake.
However, in conversations I had with them over the weekend, they often brought up their own teachers, all of whom have long since passed. It was clear that they were aware of their own differences from those who came before them, and often felt as if they were quite small in comparison. Several times over the weekend, I heard my former teachers mention that they felt that their teachers had been Renaissance men, colorful characters, and exemplary scholars whose example they found it difficult to live up to. And yet, my teachers took archaeology as a field to new heights, learned things that their teachers would have thought impossible, and very much lived up to the standards left for them.
The generation that taught my teachers had been brought up in archaeology during a time when it was more tightly integrated into both ethnography and history, and were from a generation where a well-rounded individual knew their profession as well as how to do a variety of other things (build a house, write a poem, care for animals, etc. etc.), and these facts were frequently brought up when my teachers wanted to illustrate what had been lost. Of course, my teachers were themselves more than simply diggers. They may not have engaged in ethnography and linguistics like their teachers did, but they tied archaeology more closely to robust methods, put an emphasis on making bridging arguments between the materials taken out of the ground and the conclusions drawn from them, they began the steps to bring archaeologists and local communities closer together, and they emphasized to their students the importance of leaving one's ego at the door and following the data.
And my teachers were, and are, of course colorful characters who loom larger-than-life in the eyes of their students. Even the most accomplished of us feels disappointment when they disapprove of our work, and a sense of satisfaction when they praise our work.
And, of course, when we compare ourselves to our mentors, it seems that we will find ourselves wanting. We lack their decades of experience, though we will gain it one day. Importantly, we are also different. Their mentors were shaped by WWII, the Depression, the Labor Movement, and the desire to make life normal, and (as there were few women among that generation of archaeologists) to live up to a particular measure of masculinity (as Rob Edwards describes it, contrary to the "loony left" faculty that is so often described, the anthropology faculty of 1960s/70s UC Davis was politically and socially conservative, if not reactionary). So to were my mentors shaped by the social unrest of the 60s, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the strangeness of the 1980s. They are no less men (still, in that generation, relatively few women in archaeology) of their times than their mentors had been before them.
While at the SCAs, I ran into several people who I taught to do lab work, or trained in the field. Do I figure in their minds the way my teachers figure in mine? I don't know. Probably not, though, as I am not primarily a teacher. But I do know that Dustin MacKenzie's students view him in the same way I view Rob. Lynn Gamble's students view her in much the same way that I view Michael Glassow. And my archaeology is different than that of my teachers, just as their was different from their teachers. I have to be part archaeologist, part businessman, and part regulatory specialist. Dustin has to be a teacher and entertainer as much as he is an archaeologist. I have friends in government positions who have to be regulators and enforcement just as much as archaeologists. We are all wearing many hats, but we are all still part of the same continuum that contains our predecessors and theirs. And while Vietnam and WWII are history to me, my generation has been shaped by computers, the Internet, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic decline, and needlessly polarized political discourse. We are products of our time as surely as the previous generations were products of theirs. This will influence our archaeology just as the social contexts of the past influenced the archaeology of the past.
Still, as much as I try to pump myself up, it's hard not to see this as a period in which giants are passing from the Earth, and wonder if my generation will measure up. I suppose that's for the next generation of archaeologists to decide.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Degrees and Career
I used to think that I would get a PhD. I wanted a career in academics, and that requires a PhD*. Then I went to graduate school. I had entered UC Santa Barbara's MA program intending to switch over to the PhD program if I thought I could handle it after the first year (the first two years for the MA and PhD students were essentially identical, except that the PhD students generally had more funding opportunities). At the end of the first year, I knew I could handle the PhD program, but I no Longer wanted a PhD. I saw how the faculty had to structure their lives because of their work demands, and decided that I didn't want to be an academic. Generally, if one is an archaeologist and one is not an academic, then one works in cultural resource management, and here I am today.
In order to be successful in academics, you have to live, breathe, eat, and drink your subject. Especially early in the career, when you're seeking tenure and trying to establish yourself as a researcher and a teacher, you can expect to take low-paying, lousy jobs and work to the exclusion of other parts of your life. There are people who thrive in this sort of setting, who do truly brilliant work and love the research enough to make the sacrifices. I'm not one of them. I like a steady paycheck, I like having numerous hobbies outside of work. I like having a personal life in which I get to spend significant amounts of time with my partner. In short, I like having the sort of life that an academic career would make difficult, at least until I was well into my career and had a tenured position.
What's more, there are damn few academic jobs. The last time I bothered to look up the statistics, some time around 2005, there was something in the neighborhood of 10 PhDs granted per job opening per years. And you weren't just competing for that job with the other nine people who had earned a degree that year, you were also competing with the nine people who hadn't gotten a job the year before, the nine the year before that, the nine before that, etc. By contrast, in the year before I had finished my MA, I had received an average of one unsolicited job offer per month, and I could expect to work an average of 40-50 hours per week at most of these jobs.
Now, you can certainly get a CRM job with a PhD, and many successful and excellent CRM archaeologists have such degrees, I have had the good fortune to work with many of them. But there are few, if any, CRM jobs that require that the job holder have a PhD. The reason for this is simple - the CRM industry was created by law and regulation, and while those regulations vary a bit from government agency to government agency, none of them require a Principle Investigator (the head-honcho archaeologist) to have a degree higher than an MA, which means that no other position within the hierarchy is required to have anything higher than an MA. In fact, it is usually assumed by CRM firms (rather unjustly, I might add) that if someone has a PhD, then it means that they want to be an academic but couldn't find a job, and so many hiring managers will pass up someone with a PhD in favor of someone with an MA.
Yeah, CRM was the career path for me, and an MA was the degree for me.
Strangely, not everyone saw it this way. My advisor, knowing the academic and CRM job markets, certainly was supportive of my decision. Brian Fagan, who's last year teaching was my first year as a grad student, was encouraging of both myself and the other fellow in the grad program looking at a CRM career. The people I knew who worked in CRM were all extremely encouraging, including those who were themselves working towards PhDs. However, a few other grad students and faculty members had a different attitude.
I have spoken with other people who have attended grad schools with both MA and PhD programs, and they have told me stories of just how obnoxious the PhD students could be towards the MA students. This was not my experience. While there were a small number of snobbish PhD students who treated us MA folks badly, the majority considered us colleagues and treated us no different from the other grad students, which was appropriate seeing as how the only real difference between the MA and PhD programs were that PhD students wrote a dissertation that was potentially longer and more complex than the standard MA thesis (I say potentially because several MA students, myself included, wrote MA theses that were longer and more complex than was required of the PhD dissertations).
No, the attitude that we encountered was one that was intended to be encouraging, and this good intention was appreciated, but which grew tiresome. Most of the PhD students wanted careers in academia, and were willing to put up with all that such a career entailed. Like many people who are passionate about something, they assume that other interested people are just as passionate as they are. In truth, us MA students differed from the PhD students not in terms of our merit but we were simply less passionate than them about our topic - we were not willing or interested in making the necessary sacrifices to have an academic career, but this was something that most of the nascent academics had a hard time understanding (though, again, there were a few who did get it). Of course, it didn't help that my department had a large number of people who were interested in Peruvian temples, and as such had a hard time grasping that there are, in fact, people who are genuinely interested in hunter-gatherer archaeology and not interested in massive temples.
But, again, this was at least usually an encouraging attitude. Stranger were the sorts of things that I got from family members, primarily my mother. My father granted that I had a pretty good idea of what my career required and expected that I knew what I was doing. My sisters generally got that, but occasionally would get confused and pester me about my "stopping with just a Masters degree**." My mother seems to have now accepted that I am in a line of work where an MA is the ideal degree, but from the time I started graduate school until about a year after I finished, she would routinely express her dissapointment that I wasn't earning a PhD, and kept insisting that I would be better off with a PhD than an MA even though this was demonstrably false. Her basic logic being that a PhD would open up academic jobs, and therefore give me a wider career field. Of course, as already stated, the academic job market is so terrible that opening it up only marginally widens the job search field and having a PhD often limits the willingness of CRM firms to hire a person, so having a PhD may actually reduce employment opportunities overall. It took six years of explaining this to my mother before she finally got it.
Ultimately, this seemd to be the basic pattern: people assume that a PhD is more prestigious (arguably true) and therefore will lead to greater career success (demonstrably false), and most laypeople assume that all or most archaeologists work in a research/academic setting (about as far from true as you can get and still be in the same galaxy). As a result, when people hear what I do for a living, they start addressing me as "Dr." and when I point out that I hold an MA and not a PhD, they become confused and tend to ask why I dropped out of my PhD program, never thinking that someone in my line would actually seek an MA.
So it goes.
*With the exception of teaching at community colleges, which is actually a pretty sweet gig, but for which full-time jobs are increasingly rare.
**I always found the "you only have a Masters degree" attitude to be bizarre. It's a difficult degree to get, and only a small portion of the population has it, but because people expect someone in my line of work to have a PhD (even though most of us don't), there's this weird tendency for people outside of my profession to try to shame archaeologists who have Masters degrees.
In order to be successful in academics, you have to live, breathe, eat, and drink your subject. Especially early in the career, when you're seeking tenure and trying to establish yourself as a researcher and a teacher, you can expect to take low-paying, lousy jobs and work to the exclusion of other parts of your life. There are people who thrive in this sort of setting, who do truly brilliant work and love the research enough to make the sacrifices. I'm not one of them. I like a steady paycheck, I like having numerous hobbies outside of work. I like having a personal life in which I get to spend significant amounts of time with my partner. In short, I like having the sort of life that an academic career would make difficult, at least until I was well into my career and had a tenured position.
What's more, there are damn few academic jobs. The last time I bothered to look up the statistics, some time around 2005, there was something in the neighborhood of 10 PhDs granted per job opening per years. And you weren't just competing for that job with the other nine people who had earned a degree that year, you were also competing with the nine people who hadn't gotten a job the year before, the nine the year before that, the nine before that, etc. By contrast, in the year before I had finished my MA, I had received an average of one unsolicited job offer per month, and I could expect to work an average of 40-50 hours per week at most of these jobs.
Now, you can certainly get a CRM job with a PhD, and many successful and excellent CRM archaeologists have such degrees, I have had the good fortune to work with many of them. But there are few, if any, CRM jobs that require that the job holder have a PhD. The reason for this is simple - the CRM industry was created by law and regulation, and while those regulations vary a bit from government agency to government agency, none of them require a Principle Investigator (the head-honcho archaeologist) to have a degree higher than an MA, which means that no other position within the hierarchy is required to have anything higher than an MA. In fact, it is usually assumed by CRM firms (rather unjustly, I might add) that if someone has a PhD, then it means that they want to be an academic but couldn't find a job, and so many hiring managers will pass up someone with a PhD in favor of someone with an MA.
Yeah, CRM was the career path for me, and an MA was the degree for me.
Strangely, not everyone saw it this way. My advisor, knowing the academic and CRM job markets, certainly was supportive of my decision. Brian Fagan, who's last year teaching was my first year as a grad student, was encouraging of both myself and the other fellow in the grad program looking at a CRM career. The people I knew who worked in CRM were all extremely encouraging, including those who were themselves working towards PhDs. However, a few other grad students and faculty members had a different attitude.
I have spoken with other people who have attended grad schools with both MA and PhD programs, and they have told me stories of just how obnoxious the PhD students could be towards the MA students. This was not my experience. While there were a small number of snobbish PhD students who treated us MA folks badly, the majority considered us colleagues and treated us no different from the other grad students, which was appropriate seeing as how the only real difference between the MA and PhD programs were that PhD students wrote a dissertation that was potentially longer and more complex than the standard MA thesis (I say potentially because several MA students, myself included, wrote MA theses that were longer and more complex than was required of the PhD dissertations).
No, the attitude that we encountered was one that was intended to be encouraging, and this good intention was appreciated, but which grew tiresome. Most of the PhD students wanted careers in academia, and were willing to put up with all that such a career entailed. Like many people who are passionate about something, they assume that other interested people are just as passionate as they are. In truth, us MA students differed from the PhD students not in terms of our merit but we were simply less passionate than them about our topic - we were not willing or interested in making the necessary sacrifices to have an academic career, but this was something that most of the nascent academics had a hard time understanding (though, again, there were a few who did get it). Of course, it didn't help that my department had a large number of people who were interested in Peruvian temples, and as such had a hard time grasping that there are, in fact, people who are genuinely interested in hunter-gatherer archaeology and not interested in massive temples.
But, again, this was at least usually an encouraging attitude. Stranger were the sorts of things that I got from family members, primarily my mother. My father granted that I had a pretty good idea of what my career required and expected that I knew what I was doing. My sisters generally got that, but occasionally would get confused and pester me about my "stopping with just a Masters degree**." My mother seems to have now accepted that I am in a line of work where an MA is the ideal degree, but from the time I started graduate school until about a year after I finished, she would routinely express her dissapointment that I wasn't earning a PhD, and kept insisting that I would be better off with a PhD than an MA even though this was demonstrably false. Her basic logic being that a PhD would open up academic jobs, and therefore give me a wider career field. Of course, as already stated, the academic job market is so terrible that opening it up only marginally widens the job search field and having a PhD often limits the willingness of CRM firms to hire a person, so having a PhD may actually reduce employment opportunities overall. It took six years of explaining this to my mother before she finally got it.
Ultimately, this seemd to be the basic pattern: people assume that a PhD is more prestigious (arguably true) and therefore will lead to greater career success (demonstrably false), and most laypeople assume that all or most archaeologists work in a research/academic setting (about as far from true as you can get and still be in the same galaxy). As a result, when people hear what I do for a living, they start addressing me as "Dr." and when I point out that I hold an MA and not a PhD, they become confused and tend to ask why I dropped out of my PhD program, never thinking that someone in my line would actually seek an MA.
So it goes.
*With the exception of teaching at community colleges, which is actually a pretty sweet gig, but for which full-time jobs are increasingly rare.
**I always found the "you only have a Masters degree" attitude to be bizarre. It's a difficult degree to get, and only a small portion of the population has it, but because people expect someone in my line of work to have a PhD (even though most of us don't), there's this weird tendency for people outside of my profession to try to shame archaeologists who have Masters degrees.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Voucher and Ideology Ramble
Every few years the notion of school vouchers comes up. For those who are unaware, the concept of vouchers is simply that, rather than automatically funnel all or most education money to public (state-run) schools, the government would provide vouchers that parents could use to either send their children to private schools, or turn over to state-run schools in order to fund them. Some localities already provide these vouchers, but in most parts of the U.S. it comes up as a political issue once or twice a decade, and then fades away again.
There are a few different agruments that tend to be used on both the pro and the con side of the debate, and if you have internet access (and therefore are reading this) you can look them up easily on your own. While I am hesitant to muck with education funding any more than we currently are, I can see some merit in the basic concept of vouchers (though I did vote against them when they came up on a ballot). But there is one argument that seems to be the standard argument for those who are in favor of a voucher system and I have always thought it was a poor argument.
Okay, so, to not get too far ahead of myself: the standard argument that I have heard in favor of school vouchers is based on an old and overly-simplistic market economic model. Put simply the argument is this:
Now, there's a few problems with this argument, the first of which being that there are many ways that schools can become more efficient and improve test scores while not actually educating students particularly well - the ol' "teaching to the test" issue. There's also the fact that this turns all schools into businesses with funding potentially coming before students. While it could pay off in the end, this is admittedly me being literally conservative in wanting to avoid what I think is unnecessary change to an important institution, there is a possibility of introducing an increased risk of financial corruption - We have seen such things in every other for-profit business, so why not here?
But, to my mind, the biggest flaw in the argument is that it assumes that parents will send their children to the school that bests educates them. Based on what I have seen from both private schools and home-school settings, I don't see any reason to assume that this will be the case.
Here's the basic problem - there are a lot of people in the world for whom ideology is more important than observable reality. These folks may be a minority, but they are a sizable minority. These are the people for whom ideology, usually political or religious ideology (often the two mixed together) is the arbiter of what they believe, even when it contradicts the pbvious facts of the world around them. And if vouchers are the reality, then these folks would be likely to seek schools that cater to their pre-conceptions and therefore not only fail to educate their students, but actually misinform in ways that range from the silly to the dangerous.
Creationism and Christian Nationalism are the most obvious examples of demonstrably false beliefs being taught already in private schools and home schooling programs (and, if the current Texas school board has its way, in public schools). I rant about them frequently already (in fact, a post ranting about them dropped last week), so let's try some other beliefs...
Consider, for example, that I know many people who are completely convinced that the Americas were settled not by people who crossed over from Asia 10,000 - 13,000 years ago, but by some other group of people at some other time. For some, such as the LDS (Mormon) church, this is a matter of religious dogma. For others, it's part of a conspiracy-mongering ideology that holds that all actual history is some sort of plan to dupe the populace. For others it is part of a racist claim to "white racial ownership" of the Americas. The effects of such belief on public policy should they become commonly taught are hard to say - certainly the racist views would be harmful, but some of the other views might simply be absurd. But regardless, there is nearly two centuries of archaeological and physical anthropological data, and increasing amounts of genetic data, showing all of these beliefs to be completely and utterly false. Students taught this in schools are not being well educated, and yet there are many people who would happily send their children to a school that taught such things, and many other people who simply wouldn't care if their children attended a school that taught such things. And yet the children would be astoundingly misinformed, and the education system would, by definition, not be working.
Let's take another example. I know many people associated with the home schooling movement who believe that modern medicine is a sham by major companies to keep the populace sick and take their money and/or control their minds, and that modern doctors don't actually know anything about preventative care. Aside from being paranoid in the extreme and completely out of touch with reality, this sort of belief also has another problem in that it sows the seeds of an unhealthy populace. People who reject scientific medicine don't just reject what are admittedly often troublesome or even downright dirty action on the parts of pharmeceutical companies, they also reject the methods that have proven reliable over the last two hundred years in identifying and either eliminating or else mitigating the causes of illnesses, steadily improving our cultural ability to cope with biological hazards. It is no surprise that the pockets where these sorts of beliefs have taken hold, whether it be the (not really all that) venerable Christian Scientists or followers of various New-Age paths, have become hotbeds for resurgences of previously near-eradicated disease. Moreover, by teaching that physicians and researchers are not to be trusted, these beliefs have, at least in my experience, had the tendency of teaching their followers (and the children of said followers) that facts don't matter in determining reality, and knowledge is only a lesser cousin to emotional appeal in determining the validity of a claim.
So, again, parents who buy into this but who are currently unable to put their kids into home-schooling (and I know many such people) would, with the vouchers, be able to use the education system as a tool to spread false and dangerous beliefs that are likely to create a public health risk.
Many people are probably going to say that I am being paranoid. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so (well, I guess it's rather obvious that I wouldn't think so, being as how I'm the one advocating this position and all). I am now at an age where many of my old friends have school-age children. I have found that most of these people tend to expect that their children's textbooks will be well-researched, and the teachers well-trained. And so, if they are sending their children to school, they will assume that what the child learns is more-or less accurate. It is generally the more zealous folks, driven by ideology rather than an attachment to reality, that will question what is taught in schools, but they will question it for all of the wrong reasons and in all of the wrong ways. As a result, these folks, it seems, would be more likely to look into changing their childrens schools if it were to become feasible to do so. So, rather than an improvement to the schools, with well-run schools with a good curriculum becoming more common, we'd likely see schools run for ideological reasons becoming more common. The economic argument just seems like a very poor one.
However, perhaps I am completely wrong. So, here's what I will do as time allows, I will start looking into school districts where vouchers have become part of the system. I'll see, if such information is available, what types of schools thrive in that environment. And in a few months time, I will write a follow-up with what I find.
And I hope that I am wrong.
There are a few different agruments that tend to be used on both the pro and the con side of the debate, and if you have internet access (and therefore are reading this) you can look them up easily on your own. While I am hesitant to muck with education funding any more than we currently are, I can see some merit in the basic concept of vouchers (though I did vote against them when they came up on a ballot). But there is one argument that seems to be the standard argument for those who are in favor of a voucher system and I have always thought it was a poor argument.
Okay, so, to not get too far ahead of myself: the standard argument that I have heard in favor of school vouchers is based on an old and overly-simplistic market economic model. Put simply the argument is this:
If a voucher system is in place, then schools will have to compete for funding, which will result in schools that fail closing down, and improved performance on the part of other schools as they compete with each other. Therefore, a voucher system will result in the education system improving overall, cutting out the deadwood and performing in a more efficient and productive manner.
Now, there's a few problems with this argument, the first of which being that there are many ways that schools can become more efficient and improve test scores while not actually educating students particularly well - the ol' "teaching to the test" issue. There's also the fact that this turns all schools into businesses with funding potentially coming before students. While it could pay off in the end, this is admittedly me being literally conservative in wanting to avoid what I think is unnecessary change to an important institution, there is a possibility of introducing an increased risk of financial corruption - We have seen such things in every other for-profit business, so why not here?
But, to my mind, the biggest flaw in the argument is that it assumes that parents will send their children to the school that bests educates them. Based on what I have seen from both private schools and home-school settings, I don't see any reason to assume that this will be the case.
Here's the basic problem - there are a lot of people in the world for whom ideology is more important than observable reality. These folks may be a minority, but they are a sizable minority. These are the people for whom ideology, usually political or religious ideology (often the two mixed together) is the arbiter of what they believe, even when it contradicts the pbvious facts of the world around them. And if vouchers are the reality, then these folks would be likely to seek schools that cater to their pre-conceptions and therefore not only fail to educate their students, but actually misinform in ways that range from the silly to the dangerous.
Creationism and Christian Nationalism are the most obvious examples of demonstrably false beliefs being taught already in private schools and home schooling programs (and, if the current Texas school board has its way, in public schools). I rant about them frequently already (in fact, a post ranting about them dropped last week), so let's try some other beliefs...
Consider, for example, that I know many people who are completely convinced that the Americas were settled not by people who crossed over from Asia 10,000 - 13,000 years ago, but by some other group of people at some other time. For some, such as the LDS (Mormon) church, this is a matter of religious dogma. For others, it's part of a conspiracy-mongering ideology that holds that all actual history is some sort of plan to dupe the populace. For others it is part of a racist claim to "white racial ownership" of the Americas. The effects of such belief on public policy should they become commonly taught are hard to say - certainly the racist views would be harmful, but some of the other views might simply be absurd. But regardless, there is nearly two centuries of archaeological and physical anthropological data, and increasing amounts of genetic data, showing all of these beliefs to be completely and utterly false. Students taught this in schools are not being well educated, and yet there are many people who would happily send their children to a school that taught such things, and many other people who simply wouldn't care if their children attended a school that taught such things. And yet the children would be astoundingly misinformed, and the education system would, by definition, not be working.
Let's take another example. I know many people associated with the home schooling movement who believe that modern medicine is a sham by major companies to keep the populace sick and take their money and/or control their minds, and that modern doctors don't actually know anything about preventative care. Aside from being paranoid in the extreme and completely out of touch with reality, this sort of belief also has another problem in that it sows the seeds of an unhealthy populace. People who reject scientific medicine don't just reject what are admittedly often troublesome or even downright dirty action on the parts of pharmeceutical companies, they also reject the methods that have proven reliable over the last two hundred years in identifying and either eliminating or else mitigating the causes of illnesses, steadily improving our cultural ability to cope with biological hazards. It is no surprise that the pockets where these sorts of beliefs have taken hold, whether it be the (not really all that) venerable Christian Scientists or followers of various New-Age paths, have become hotbeds for resurgences of previously near-eradicated disease. Moreover, by teaching that physicians and researchers are not to be trusted, these beliefs have, at least in my experience, had the tendency of teaching their followers (and the children of said followers) that facts don't matter in determining reality, and knowledge is only a lesser cousin to emotional appeal in determining the validity of a claim.
So, again, parents who buy into this but who are currently unable to put their kids into home-schooling (and I know many such people) would, with the vouchers, be able to use the education system as a tool to spread false and dangerous beliefs that are likely to create a public health risk.
Many people are probably going to say that I am being paranoid. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so (well, I guess it's rather obvious that I wouldn't think so, being as how I'm the one advocating this position and all). I am now at an age where many of my old friends have school-age children. I have found that most of these people tend to expect that their children's textbooks will be well-researched, and the teachers well-trained. And so, if they are sending their children to school, they will assume that what the child learns is more-or less accurate. It is generally the more zealous folks, driven by ideology rather than an attachment to reality, that will question what is taught in schools, but they will question it for all of the wrong reasons and in all of the wrong ways. As a result, these folks, it seems, would be more likely to look into changing their childrens schools if it were to become feasible to do so. So, rather than an improvement to the schools, with well-run schools with a good curriculum becoming more common, we'd likely see schools run for ideological reasons becoming more common. The economic argument just seems like a very poor one.
However, perhaps I am completely wrong. So, here's what I will do as time allows, I will start looking into school districts where vouchers have become part of the system. I'll see, if such information is available, what types of schools thrive in that environment. And in a few months time, I will write a follow-up with what I find.
And I hope that I am wrong.
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