There are many different archaeology jobs, or jobs that are performed in order to conduct an archaeological investigation. Some of these jobs are carried out archaeologists, but others are carried out people with a variety of other types of professional training—because fields like classics and anthropology overlap with archaeology—or no training at all.
An instructor or faculty member who teaches archaeology at a higher education institution, such as a community college, a college, or a university, is one type of archaeology job. A professor of archaeology may teach undergraduates, graduate students, or both, and may work in a variety of departments other than archaeology, such as anthropology, art history, classics, history, and theology. Academic archaeology jobs are typically nine months long, and the archaeologist may spend the summer doing something else.
Academic affiliation is not required for archaeology jobs in museums. Fieldwork or administrative duties may be part of a museum job. A museum archaeologist would most likely create exhibits in addition to conducting, publishing, and presenting research. Some museum employees may hold university appointments in addition to their museum jobs in a museum with a university affiliation.
Archaeology jobs can be found in a variety of federal government departments. The Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the United States Forest Service employ a total of 800 archaeologists. Archaeologists are also employed the State Historic Preservation Office, and archaeologists may be used state highway, park, and water resources departments. If a city has an archaeological site, archaeologists may be hired to advise it. CRM, or cultural resources management, is the term used to describe the oversight of such situations. The private firms that investigate CRM sites are the other side of CRM. In this area, archaeologists both locate and excavate sites.
Archaeology, it turns out, is one of the fields where volunteers are frequently used. Volunteers may work in the field or in the lab, depending on whether or not they have prior excavation experience. They may conduct screenings on-site, or they may perform a variety of tasks in the lab, such as sorting and labeling, as well as identification and data analysis.