If you haven’t been living underneath a bridge, you’ve probably noticed something strange is happening. “Unprecedented” is what we’re calling it. Cultural resource management archaeology (CRM) hasn’t been spared unusual times either. If you are reading this, you probably know our world is changing in many ways. I’m trying to remain positive, but it’s not always easy:
- The year 2024 was the hottest on record. There were 151 extreme weather events that killed over 800,000 people. Six typhoons hit the Philippines in one month. The hottest temperature of the year was nearly 122 degrees in Western Australia. Hurricane Helene hit Florida and brought flooding as far as North Carolina. A firestorm ravaged Los Angeles in January 2025 caused between $28 and $53 billion in damage. More than 16,000 structures burned as 14 fires simultaneously burned for 18 days straight. More than a dozen 1,000-year flood events happened in the first week of July, 2025 alone.
- This year (2025) is the year when the largest number of college-aged students in the United States will graduate. Demographers expect the number of college-aged students to continue to decline for at least the next 40 years. This will effect archaeology.
- Population declines creating bottlenecks are common in many areas of the world. Populations are declining in China, South Korea, Japan, and much of the European Union. Meanwhile, lower fertility rates in places like the United States will change demographics. Across much of the developed world, a smaller cohort of younger people will be expected to provide for a larger number of elderly people.
- Political upheaval has gripped the globe as our international relationships break apart. The United States has taken an extreme conservative political turn not seen since the Great Depression. In 2025, a new president has sewn chaos as extreme conservatives seek to shatter, bend, and break constitutional law. Other countries are also taking conservative political turns.
- In the wake of this political realignment, academia and government agencies are under assault. The Federal government is drastically slashing research funding for universities while also laying off significant numbers of full-time employees (FTEs) at agencies. Students are seeing their visas declined without warning. Some have been kidnapped by Federal agents and deported. We seem to be unsure if any of this is legal but it’s happening.
- We are in a recession. There, I said it. People around the world are feeling the pinch of rising prices, stagnant wages, and an uncertain job market.
All of this is happening in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter race uprisings, the COVID pandemic, increased economic concentration among the elites, and burgeoning government debt loads. As usual there are also dozens of armed conflicts raging around the world including ongoing wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza. It’s not as bad as the news says but it’s also not as good as we’d like it to be. These are the times in which we were incarnated.
It goes without saying that we are living in extraordinary times. But if you think about it, all we human beings have ever known is extraordinary times. It seems like things are spinning out of control, but it shouldn’t be surprising because we evolved in a constantly changing world. Stability is the illusion.
Archaeology continues as the world changes rapidly. The world needs us more now than ever before. Now is the time when the world really needs to listen to an international community of scholars with deep insights into past human lifeways. Now is the time when they should be looking to us for information on how we survived these cataclysms in the past. What did human societies do? What can we learn from our ancestors?
Now is the time when the world needs archaeologists. Archaeology needs you! The question is: How can you build a career in archaeology?
A college degree isn’t free
The craziest thing about all of this is: cultural resource management (CRM) is sorely in need of more archaeologists. Right now, there is more work than CRM companies can handle. Changes like rebuilding our infrastructure, a building boom in certain cities, and infrastructure maintenance creates undertakings. Undertakings lead to CRM. I am not sure how long this will last but we are in demand right now.
Additionally, the demographic changes in the United States have led to a nationwide archaeologist shortage. As Altschul and Klein (2022) note, the expansion of infrastructure funding could lead to as many as 8,000 new CRM full time employees (FTEs) in the next few years. Retirements and natural career outmigration will add to this total. But universities are not producing enough anthropology graduates to meet this demand. Anthropology undergraduate majors across the country have been in decline since the 2010s.
The Pandemic only added to these declines. The Enrollment Cliff will make it worse. Undergraduate enrollments in my department have not risen to pre-Pandemic levels even though the university has added thousands of new enrollments. The Enrollment Cliff and 45—47’s research funding hack job has caused extreme pain for many state universities and smaller schools. (Ironically, some of these smaller schools were the few institutions teaching CRM archaeology.) Laying off tens of thousands of government workers across all agencies isn’t helping our industry either.
Meanwhile, larger flagship institutions are increasing enrollments because they need to replace the funding that was chopped and because they have large debt obligations to service. They’re also increasing tuition. Universities in the United States are part higher learning institutions and part for-profit investment vehicles. Public universities issue bonds to fund their operations because, since the 1980s, the government has been withdrawing funding while overhead at universities has only increased. Investors looking for a secure bet buy the bonds since they are pretty sure states will not allow their universities to go bankrupt, and they know universities can always charge students more in tuition if they need money.
Universities are the only ones selling college degrees so they know they have a monopoly on the social proof that shows you can follow directions and keep working towards a difficult goal for half a decade (e.g. a diploma). Don’t get me wrong. There is learning that happens in a university. It’s just not the learning that you need to get a job. Those who invest in universities want growth. Education has become second to paying the bills. And universities must grow to pay back investors. So, you see schools adding more amenities (e.g. rec centers, football stadiums, luxury student housing, ect.) You see schools doing whatever they can to get more students.
Right now, elite schools are going on a debt bonanza, issuing millions of dollars in bonds in hopes of compensating for the money the federal government has withheld from them. Investors are eating it up:
It’s a positive feedback loop. Issue bonds and raise tuition to recoup the funding the state used to provide. à Now you need to grow to pay back the bonds because you must repay the original sum plus a dividend. So you build more labs, bigger stadium, make it to a BCS Bowl football game which brings boosters to “build your brand” and pay for a Hollywood head coach (Now you also need to cover the luxuries Hollywood student-athletes demand because they want Name, Image, Likeness [NIL] money and that doesn’t come to players who aren’t at a top school. You need to be a top school for this to all work out financially. So you need to spend top school money.)
Now the school’s “brand” costs more so you have to harvest more through tuition, grant overhead, and donations. But you still owe on the previous bonds. The Solution?— Issue more bonds, including some to pay the interest on the previous series of bonds but also more to build amenities and pay for more labs… Recruit more students. Recruit better athletes. Get that ESPN money. Raise tuition. à But you still need even more money. You need more students. More tuition. More amenities. More boosters. More overhead from NSF grants. A cut of that NIL money. Fall short of the mark? à Issue more bonds. Raise tuition. Recruit more students… At this point, our universities are public-private investment vehicles rather than institutes of higher learning.
For nearly 40 years, this system worked but it’s starting to crack. The government is cutting back even more on research money. They want to limit overhead on grants. There are fewer college-aged Americans. Tuition is higher than you can expect to make after graduation. Students are keen on that reality. Gen-X is the first generation to still be working so hard to pay off their student loans that they don’t have time to be grandparents. In fact, young college graduates are working so hard to pay off their loans they didn’t have the time or money to have children or buy a house. This is one of the reasons why we are facing an Enrollment Cliff.
Higher education has been made aware that this drop in enrollment was coming. I’ve been writing about it for the past couple of years (https://www.succinctresearch.com/enrollment-cliff-and-archaeology/). But higher education has not been able to change its revenue strategy enough to address it. Higher ed can’t tighten its belt either because it has a lot of debt and outstanding bonds. Also professors like me don’t work for free. In fact, we all want raises to cover all the additional overhead that this “streamlined” university forces us to undertake. However, it does not seem higher education was cognizant of the fact that their degrees were struggling to provide an adequate “Wealth Gap” to justify the price of going to school. Otherwise, universities would change the way they’re doing business.
Folks working in CRM know archaeology wages are not the highest. It has never been easy to become an archaeologist, but it may be financially counterproductive if you take on massive student loans to fund the education needed to become a professional archaeologist. But this country needs archaeology. CRM was an essential service during the pandemic which means our country cannot move forward without it. It also means universities still need to produce archaeologists since our professional certifications are based on us having college degrees.
[NOTE: Many fear federal regulations and historical revisionism will erase CRM archaeology, but I argue it will not be that easy to abolish it in states with environmental laws. Without congressional acts, the feds cannot erase environmental laws so easily. And it wouldn’t happen without legal fights from environmentalists and Native American tribes. I think CRM could be weakened but not entirely eliminated in our lifetime. We may have states like California where it survives juxtaposed against places like Idaho, where I’m from.
Just look at a map of the 2024 presidential election. The blue ones will still have environmental laws, civil rights, and science at the state level for the time being. That’s where CRM will live on when the rest of the country $hits the bed.]
Archaeology and living your dreams
Becoming a professional archaeologist is not easy. To have a career, you’re going to need a college degree. Despite it all, I still feel like it’s worth a shot to become an archaeologist if that’s what you really want. And if the pandemic taught us anything it is:
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- Life is short and unpredictable.
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- You never know what will happen.
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- This is your only chance to go for your dreams.
I say shoot for the stars but be smart about it. You can miss your goal and end up wallowing in debt, watching your life trickle by as you work some job you can’t stand because you owe thousands of dollars in student loans that can never be discharged through bankruptcy. Or, you can get a college degree in anthropology for free, or low cost, and hit the CRM job market. Don’t expect it to be easy but expect to achieve your dreams. Your mental vision will be your most powerful asset.
Again, building a career in cultural resource management archaeology is hard even though many people think it will be as easy as other career paths. Dreams do not always come true; They are not always vivid. Sometimes dreams are plans in real life, but two rules regarding dreams still stand: 1) They don’t always turn out the way you dreamed it would be and 2) even the most comprehensive dreams are not as vivid as real life.
I have been working in archaeology for over 20 years now- as a CRMer (field tech up to Principal Investigator [2003—Present]) and as a tenure track professor at an R1 school (2017—Present). Even though I’m an associate professor, I still do CRM projects and give students the opportunity to learn how to do archaeology while getting paid to do it. Interestingly, everything I learned as a CRM archaeologist has really helped me as a professor. But almost nothing I’ve learned as a professor would have helped me be a better CRM archaeologist. Glad I did CRM first.
I’ve also been writing on this blog for over a decade. Here are some posts that I think can help you navigate the CRM archaeology job market in these uncertain times. I’m sure you’ll find something that will help you forge a career in this uncertain world:
Should I get a college degree to do archaeology?
You don’t need a college degree to do archaeology, but you probably won’t get paid to do archaeology if you don’t have a degree. So, you’re gonna want to get an anthropology degree if you want to work in CRM.
Most college courses are worthless for a CRM career, including most anthropology courses. Just put in a tour of duty at an accredited school and get your degree as soon and cheaply as possible.
A Master’s degree will help you keep a job in archaeology. The CRM industry is capricious. Most CRMers don’t stay in archaeology their whole lives since most CRMers don’t get permanent jobs. The few that end up working in the industry for decades job hop and have a graduate degree, which is why I suggest you getting one at some point if you want to stay in CRM.
You do not need a PhD to become a professional archaeologist. However, you will need one to get a tenure track job. But the tenure track archaeology professor job market is brutal and probably not worth it financially. I only suggest you get a PhD if you’re absolutely insane (NOTE: I got one so you can infer what you want about me).
How can I afford the education needed to become an archaeologist?
College is expensive. It’s only getting more expensive. At this point, it’s nearly a tossup as to whether a degree is financially worth it. It all depends on how much you pay to get it. But you need one to get paid to do archaeology. My suggestions are:
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- Get in and get out as soon as possible.
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- Take out as little debt as humanly possible.
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- If possible, get the school to pay for your degree.
Another tip is to attend a school with a terminal Master’s for your graduate degree. Or, go for a fully funded PhD. It’s up to you whether you finish the PhD or quit the program once you’re ABD, which is the equivalent to a Master’s.
Is archaeological field school worth it?
This is the $7,000—$4,000 question. Yes. It’s worth it. Archaeological field school is worth the time and effort because:
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- It’s the closest thing to doing real archaeology you will experience in college.
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- CRM companies are much more likely to hire folks who have finished a field school or had an internship than those who have not, and.
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- It’s fun (for the student that is).
I do have some words of caution and encouragement in the following posts:
How do I get a job?
Network your ass off. Archaeology is a small field. You’re only one or two degrees of separation from any archaeologist or professor in the United States, so networking is paramount in this industry. Also, most jobs are found in the “Hidden Economy” (e.g. offered to folks through word of mouth without a job application). This means connecting with other archaeologists, IRL and online, is an important part of any archaeology job search.
You can also build an online persona for yourself that will help potential employers know who you are if they haven’t met you personally. LinkedIn is a cesspool these days but it’s still a database of employers and potential employees. Conferences are another excellent way to meet other archaeologists. Pick your poison (digital networking or in person) but I recommend you drink both:
https://sha.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Personal_Branding_For_Archaeologists.pdf
Boldly stride into the future
I’m getting sick of hearing the word “unprecedented.” They burned it out during the pandemic and news media pundits keep using that term as if it has meaning anymore [Or, as if the “news” has any meaning anymore.] Nothing that is happening right now has ever happened before. That is literally the definition of the present. We are always in a completely new world every day so there isn’t really any advice I can give you about building a career that will last longer than the time it took me to write this blog post. By the time I’ve learned it, we’ve already moved on. I can only give you advice based on what I know but, understand, you will need that info and more to make it these days. Your life is based on experiential learning. So is your career. I can only do so much to help you.
These days I’m only sure of a few things when it comes to being a professional archaeologist:
1) I know that what I know is constantly becoming outdated which means I have to keep learning new things. (That’s good for me because I like learning new things).
2) I don’t have any more time to wait. At my age, I can’t wait for anything anymore. I can’t wait for the economy to improve. I can’t wait for the right time because there is no right time. I can’t wait to see what other people are gonna do, or if CRM is going to make it through this administration. I have no time left to give. Neither do you.
This is important to remember because, no matter how old you are, you don’t have any time to wait either. The time to go for a career in archaeology is now. Actually, it was yesterday. Don’t wait. Go for it.
3) Archaeology will not be the only career you have. You’re gonna have five to seven careers in your life, if you’re like the average person. Do archaeology until it no longer fulfills your needs then move on to another career.
4) As is the case with #2, don’t wait for college to teach you what you need to land a job in archaeology—or any field for that matter. It’s true that some colleges and universities may roll out CRM archaeology programs (indeed, I’m working with some professors at these schools who are doing just that). We can plead our case that anthropology departments and the dean of social sciences need to start preparing students for gainful employment but, after nearly eight years in higher education, I’m not very optimistic about anthropology or higher education changing its course during my lifetime.
They are not going to change fast enough to be relevant to anyone alive today.
You cannot wait for anthropology departments to start teaching CRM
Anthropology departments still keep looking down on CRM despite acknowledging it’s where most of our students will end up working if they stay in archaeology. We professors all know the truth, but we keep working against it. We keep hiring professors with 0 CRM experience. We keep telling archaeology professors to focus on “The Triumvirate”— teaching, research, and service—without providing any space for CRM work to count for any of those three things. Anthro departments still prefer flashy scholars with “potential” over archaeologists with industry experience who have done CRM work. We hire three-time postdocs with hip research, impressionable recent PhD graduates, grant slayers who can rake in the big $, and job applicants we think are cool. These are the ones who will keep getting tenure track jobs. Even better, we’ll poach up-and-coming professors from another university rather than recruiting them from CRM because somehow hiring someone else’s professor who doesn’t know how to teach tomorrow’s CRMers is better than hiring someone who knows what it takes to build a career in archaeology that doesn’t revolve around grant funding, journal articles, and committees. And departments will keep using adjuncts to fill in the gaps.
Frankly, the higher education industry is too embedded in its existing practices to change right now. Plus, they have a monopoly on diplomas so they can keep jacking up tuition, spamming out bonds to fuel growth, and doing what they’ve been doing since the 1970s. The tremendous funding cuts that happened in 2025 haven’t caused much change in the way universities are funded so I’m not too confident that things in higher ed will change in my lifetime. Anthropology is no different than the rest of higher education.
Most importantly, it’s hard for CRM technical training programs to pencil out on a university’s spreadsheet. Like I said, universities like money. They need money. And they need professors and students to help them get it. Tuition is just one piece of the pie, but it’s a pretty big piece. So, universities want to know you’ll get enough students to pay for your CRM degree so they can use it to make that tuition slice of the fiscal pie bigger. It’s hard to predict how many enrollments a department will get in a CRM program because students these days are magnetically attracted to majors that will give a “good return on investment” (e.g. majors that lead to high paying jobs). Anthropology almost always ranks in the top ten when it comes to recent graduate unemployment (Not sure if they’re including CRMers or how they get their numbers. Just saying Anthro doesn’t always lead to immediate employability for most graduates [Probably because most anthropology departments don’t teach workplace skills or network with CRM companies]).
CRM grad programs are even more difficult to prove will be financially lucrative because of enrollments but also because it’s hard to convince departments split between the four fields of anthropology that it’s worth it to emphasize one subfield. For example, cultural anthropology professors might not be happy to learn that the department is going to start training CRM archaeologists, attracting all these archaeology majors, without giving them the same about of departmental support. Plus, more archaeology majors would require more archaeology professors and not everyone would be keen on that.
Anthropology departments have budgets too and the other subfields don’t want archaeologists in the department to get disproportionate portions of that budget. They also don’t want to cede any departmental political power to a bloc that is growing at the expense of their bloc. This could cause enough friction for colleagues to submarine any plans for a CRM grad program unless they get paid off (e.g. get a piece of the increased funding that a successful CRM program would produce). I know not all departments are as petty as this, but I can tell you from personal experience—Anthro departments can be full of extremely petty professors who do not work well together unless forced to. And many of us don’t want to lose money even if it’s for the benefit of students; even if, overall, it increases revenue and relevance of the department.
Some departments will overcome these obstacles, but most will not. These reasons are why I tell you not to hold your breath for a bunch of CRM technical programs to materialize in higher education any time soon.
Build your own cultural resource management archaeology career
I don’t blame students these days for their choices. In-state undergraduate tuition at my alma mater Boise State University has increased almost 900% since I graduated in 2001. Over 700,000 more people graduate from college today than they did in 2001; the percentage of adults 25—64 with a college degree has increased by 16% between 2009 and 2021; and college tuition has increased more than 180% on average across the country. A college degree is a risky bet these days. I don’t blame students for focusing on majors that will help them best be able to pay off the money they’ve borrowed. Unfortunately, archaeology is not going to pay enough unless the student made it through school without taking on loans.
I also don’t blame university professors for their behavior. Most of us are the “gifted” students who have absolutely mastered the game of performative education. We have always benefited from our intelligence; academia is one of those rewards. We’re set in our ways. Today’s tenure track professors stand to lose prestige if their department starts orienting itself towards a vocational track because the esoteric research they’ve been doing for decades will no longer be the primary thing that draws students to the department. Students keep going to college because they believe a college degree will help them land gainful employment. In archaeology, college degrees are absolutely essential to meet the needs of employers and the Secretary of Interior’s standards. Most of our students go to school because they want to leverage the degree to help improve their standard of living. They also think they will learn useful knowledge and skills but all of them want a diploma so they can get a better job than they would have without it.
Conversely, a large contingent of professors believe their primary mission is to “expand minds.” To introduce deep thoughts and influence the next generation through those thoughts. The problem is: Most of us don’t have unique or deep thoughts. Most of the things we think have already been thought by others. Most of our nuanced thoughts are just tangents closely paralleling mainstream thought; a slightly different take on what everyone else is already thinking but we gave it a different name. Like my PhD adviser always told me: “There is no such thing as a new thought.” I realized how true she was after I became a professor.
Some of us professors are real. We know the true impact of our labor on society. We know we’re handmaidens of the elites just like everyone else; a unique caste of proletariat, but still one of the workers without control of the means. However, many professors think above all of this. They’re busy lamenting the bad changes in the world while still contributing to the inequality at the root of it all. They think their thoughts are changing the world. And they’re right but it’s not the kind of change they were expecting. Rather than helping move us towards a more inclusive, sustainable, comfortable world where we work less and have more time for self-actualization, academia has just added to the corporatized, self-destructive, unsustainable inequality that makes us all work harder, have less security, and more depression. We sat around thinking while corporations and oligarchs were taking action. Now we find ourselves full of ideas but no accomplices in the government or business world to help us follow them through.
Given the profit motivation of the university system, the decay of governmental support for higher education, and the disconnect between professors and reality, I recommend you just get the degree and leverage it for a career ASAP. Don’t wait for us. Take your badge of honor, get out there and start walking transects. Go find sites. Protect what you can, including your own health, and build the life you imagine in your dreams.
There will probably be endless changes ahead of us just like there has always been behind us. The future has always been uncertain. Just like the Buddha told us: Don’t believe any of what I say on blind faith. Listen to my words. Investigate what I said and compare it against your own life experience and what others tell you is real. See if this aligns with what you know. If any of it does, take what you learned and move forward in your cultural resource management archaeology career. Use your heart as your guide for what works for you.
I’d like to hear from you. Write a comment below or reach out to me if you have anything to say.
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