Someone asked me the other day what my ideal job would be, and I had to say archaeologist, which I’ve been fascinated with since school. If I ever choose to go to uni would it be worth doing an archaeology degree, and if so, does anyone here have any knowledge of the professional side of this subject, who could offer tips as to how I might get employment in it? This is just a dream really but there’s no harm in asking.
Even more so than in other fields;
Seriously impress someone already in the field.
To do that I suppose I would have to sign up as a regular volunteer at digs.
I’ve done volunteering since I was a teenager, and have a decent amateur background in geology and paleontology… just yesterday I was crawling around through a hillside of thickets looking for a the walls to a vineyard from the 1800s.
You have some obvious handicaps… most of archeology is vision oriented… you have to tell from a visual scan, not haptic intuition, the smallest scant surface differentiation for guessing where your going to put your exploration holes, and then from that point on look at the differentiation in the ruble and soil for slight soil differences, layer by layer. A bland person is apt, no matter how careful, to accidentally saw right through with the mason’s spade special soil residue that indicates decayed bone (if the soil isn’t PH Balanced) or charcoal deposits… and sniffing or licking your way through it all isn’t going to cut it- your immune system isn’t that strong, and I don’t think your peers are going to be too fond of your sniff reports.
Other techniques, such as using Sonar on unearthed plots, as well as ultraviolet light on already excavated surfaces, are beyond your control.
However… despite your obvious uselessness (and I put that politely) as a field archeologist, there isn’t a reason why you couldn’t go into work in Museums, giving lectures on the area history, or on exhibits. Being a archeology professor is out of the question, given they are expected to bring their students to the field… and train them in simple stuff like how to sharpen their utensils, and visually check everyone to make sure the noobs aren’t potentially cutting their wrists by sharpening or holding them wrong. Do I think your incompetent to know how to sharpen one if taught? No… but you are not capable of watching a group of young people, some under 12, others quite old without the hand-eye coordination of their youth, sharpening the stuff… and watching over them while they dig. Archeology involves sharp tools, lot’s of dirt, and oftentimes working in environments far, far from a hospital. You gotta be able to see, period.
Now… some stuff you can do- taking samples for dating… yeah, they can label it with braille labels on the aluminum pouches they put their soil samples into… I see no real reason why accommodations can’t be made.
You have about as much a chance of becoming a field archeologist as you do a Helicopter Gunner for the military… I’m sorry. None the less, you can rub soldiers with the crowd via working in a museum. Even something like being a researcher into history can be difficult however… OCR software doesn’t work too well on manuscripts or rare types… and the libraries in England are chalk full of stuff that requires sight reading.
For example… I am trying to track down old newspaper clips from the colonial era from the old post office (post offices maintained the local printing press for the newspaper under the british empire here) and it’s a pain in the ass because my state, West Virginia, used to be part of Virginia until the civil war, and the border of Virginia and Pennsylvania was in dispute… so my town was sometimes in Pennslyvania under either French or British sovereignty, or it was under English via Virginia… but virginia’s capital was a few hundred miles away… and some of the old texts was brought back to England… and so it’s a pain in the ass just to track down simple stuff… because it can be as far as England or as west as Wisconsin due to the migration of old texts (why Wisconson? Don’t ask).
You’re not going to get a OCR to work for you under such circumstances… that font and spacing is out of the question, a computer isn’t going to grasp it. Can you imagine a medieval text? In England, that’s exactly what you’ll be reliant on to figure out where dig sites are, and how to add to context the various clues (clues 99% of the time will have to be visually verified) by looking at various histories and chronicles of the area. Was is farmland, or a swamp, fields, a village, did a battle occur here… decade by decade, for several thousands of years, the deeper you dig down.
Working in a Museum is a good possibility none the less. Being a enthusiasts for history can also work, if you can get used to having book after book electronically prepared for audio… and these books get expensive… yeah, that’s all I can think of at this time.
I wish it could be otherwise, I don’t like telling people no… but’s it’s a visual dominated field. I’m sorry… I can’t fanthom how a blind person could operate without having a assistant who also happened to be a trained archeologist doing all the real work for them… and that’s one archeologist too many on a payroll of a university.
I have just gotten my new Iphone, and took video of me crawling around the site with the stone walls in the thickets, describing the place… I was cold as hell and getting scrapped up… I can try to download it to youtube if anyone wants to see how pathetic archeology actually is… just me alone, dirty, getting poked and stung, grunting as I crawl through nasty stuff… I stepped in something nasty at a certain point. I made it for a archeology professor downstate… but it’s not ‘professionally done’… just me crawling and cursing. That about sums up the experience you’ll have 3/4ths of the time. I gotta map out the other side of the hill for a cave that was rumored back in the 1800s to have a indian burial, and then hike a few miles to photograph a really, really large tree along a country road- the tree is in a deadspace near a lost fort… and I think the tree was on the side of this road, hence why it never was cut down like the rest for firewood… it will be important for dating the colonization of the area and locating the exact point of the road, given a land-field is near by. Archeology is incredibly boring and gay at times… it’s not Indiania Jones stuff… well, it is, but like, the chicks don’t dig the stuff cause they don’t see you do it, but they see you look miserably and dirty stumbling out of a cave into a highway after spending hours in the hill lost, not knowing where you are and the fishing line you brought with you got chewed up by a raccoon… and you didn’t know that… and got lucky finding a way out… and people just beep at you, and your half covered in claw, and have to walk for a few miles back to where you started… and everyone is staring, and homeless people look better than you, and you can’t go into a store and buy water because the manage ask you to leave… so you just walk with shame all the way back, and have to sit in the shower for a hour scrubbing at the little pebbles in your hair, and finding their weird cave bug came back with you in your pack… and it’s all pisses jumping around the shower with you…
So yeah…
That’s pretty much what I figured to be honest. I thought perhaps I might have an advantage in certain specific, though limited, areas, such as sifting through dirt by touch, since my fingers are a lot more sensitive than the average sighted person’s, but maybe that’s clutching at straws.
Yeah, it is clutching at straws… besides, any archeologist is going to be as sensitive as you as time goes on. I have a lot of sensitivity Haptic wise from cleaning fossils as a kid and then my M4 in the army using old metal dental picks in the blind spots I would have to feel around for… that I likely have near equal touch when using a instrument as you in terms of discerning the vibrations of the picks end on residue… looking for that one stubborn particle of sand on a hard surface. Unensils that magnify vibrations- even STRAWS YOUR CLUTCHING TO, can amplify it.
I’ll think about it a while longer… there is a way you can contribute more directly.
If you want to volunteer, they might let you shift the screens looking for stuff- the soil from excavated squares gets put though a screen box hanging over a dirt pile… it’s shaken, and the dirt falls through, big pebbles and objects missed remains. However, rock flakes from stoneworking (lithics) can cause serious damage if hit from the wrong angle, you’ll spend some time in the hospital now and again, no matter how smart your hand movements are. Plus, people will have to be around to tell you someone this worth noting, or is nothing… but if it’s a large gathering of volunteers, it’s probably where I would put you, if not in preparing the cataloging effort in making pouches by hand, or… umm… yeah, let me think some more about this.
Honestly, look into getting a degree in a museum. I’m guessing a job is a decent possibility if your government puts quotas on hiring the disabled for such institutions. If you know where your going in a museum, you can give audio-tours, clicking and stopping on cue spot by spot. The ‘storyline’ in a museum isn’t anything like the ‘storyline’ used in hip-hop clothes stores, some displays always change, but others remain for decades in the same spot. They aren’t going to wheel the tyrannosaurus rex to a new location every few months.
Just remember, whatever our differences, I do strongly support getting disabled people into the fields they want, but it’s within reason, and won’t ever hesitate to tell you it’s a bad idea, even when it’s ‘politically correct’ to say otherwise, or even when it’s a possibility when your doubting otherwise, when I think you CAN do it. It’s who I am and I would do it with anyone.
You might do okay in basic cave exploration… so long as you have a buddy… I go solo, but it’s strongly NOT ADVISED, and I am a bad person for going solo. You need someone to tell you when there is a cliff up ahead, or if your going to knock over a rotting beam in a mine causing a cave-in. It’s mostly smell and touch in a cave… you can see, but it’s not the main ordeal… however, none the less, you going solo would be laughable as you would be stuck exploring alot of obvious deadends that a sighted person with a flashlight would know instantly NOT TO EXPLORE. There are archeological possibilities in that in working on a team.
But I suspect all the caves in England are sealed up or well explored, and more people will be concerned if they saw a blind girl tapping her stick up to one, crawling into the opening… or even funnier, you could be in a cave, and passing up a catacomb up on the walls your not aware of near the entrance for years, passing it up near the entrance, going deeper and deeper into parts not used by humans, thinking nothing was ever inside the have, despite a old King of England being buried right next to you without you ever knowing.
A museum would be ok, but I’m much more of an outdoors person which is why I like camping, orienteering etc.
What you said later about the cave, though, isn’t the case. I have a very well developed sense of echo location so would know straight away if there was an entrance up ahead or just a dead end. It’s how I navigate around unfamiliar places.
Echo location doesn’t work with coal in mines that are overflowed with clay residue- it’s always moist, and it muffles everything out. I had my light go out once one christmas eve when I was 14 (30 now, so do the math, because I don’t want to) and could hear the raccoons and rats run around in this collapsed mine I lost my cord on (they do break, and in a collapsed mine (only some collapsed) the sharp edges will cut… I freaked out because I thought I was lost, and every path was pretty much like the next… there are several flooded passages, and I knew the water came out of a rockspring through cracks, so swimming under wasn’t a option… I panicked for a good twenty minutes crawling back and forth until I found a level with the limestone level above fallen down, providing a room… and laid in there, fiddling with it. Decent echo location, and was starting to get a little bit of a breeze (which doesn’t happen usually in mines, it’s stagnant and cold, but a stable cold that if you stay still the heat builds up around you). I got the light working again, and saw bats in the ceiling, and it didn’t occur to me for a while that that meant I was near the entrance… my dumb ass was staring at the bats thinking I would have to eat them to survive until I found my way out.
I was out of the mine fast (okay, it took me twenty minutes of resting in the hole back up to the rock den that the entrance was in the rear of to climb out, but I found the way out fast, just felt relieved and rested)… but it wasn’t a experience that offered much for echo location. Your understanding of the shape of a tunnel is self evident before going into it… it’s long and rectangular. I mostly feel around with my skin for breezes for holes I can’t see in visual dead ends.
You should always go in with a buddy. They can tell you stuff, like if sleeping dog is living inside up ahead, or some rabid, territorial hedgehogs or whatever animals still live in the English countryside… here we got all sorts of critters.
Different textures of surface give off different types of echoes but I haven’t encountered one that doesn’t give off something. I do it by clicking my tongue, by the way, in case you were wondering. A series of rapid clicks will give me a pretty good idea of my surroundings up to a few yards.
The only thing that stops it is if I have a cold. Then I bump into things left, right and centre.
Yeah, there is a group in the US that trains people to walk without a stick, navigating the streets and crossing via clicks. However, like I said, wet clay is a muffler, as well as coal- you can’t hear up ahead more than a dozen or so yards in enclosed tunnels. Air gets stagnant down there, and not much of anything is heard. It’s sorta like a old fashion think-tank minus the water… it’s just you. Which, I suppose that’s me.
Anyway, the only thing I would ever go back to school for is Archeology. I don’t like the idea of armatures, even highly knowledgeable ones like me who know as much as a undergrad, go poking around in the soil… even though I did that as a kid, literally making plots and drawlings… because other archeologists won’t recognize or likely even know I did that, and the knowledge effectively gets lost. There was this archeologist back in the 30’s who did alot of work in our area, and I was the only person in town who knew about it, because I went to the university as a kid over in the next state and did digs and was told about it… I brought this up with the town’s museum- most of the ‘artifacts’ they had were from the 30s, and they never knew about it… and it’s been a absolute pain in the ass getting everything coordinated… it’s a archeology of archeology… I got a professor downstate interested in it, because he never knew about this guy even existing… and the guy who has the files apparently within the field of archeology is a recluse (that the professor I’m talking with just happened to be old classmates with) and never publishes ANYTHING.
So, literally, a entire era of archeology is literally lost right now, collected and archived, and forgotten about… meaning a archeology of archeology is required.
I should write a philosophy book on that some day… ‘A Archeology of Archeology, recovering lost ideas that were once recovered and then lost again.’
I really don’t like seeing history or ideas go down the drain. Never been fond of book burnings and denying people speech… access to ideas are precious to me, it’s our number one resource outside of life itself.
Every possible dictatorship via every person on earth being in-charge of their own system would look different and similar in ways… I suppose the way my would stand out in terms of the positive by is the fantastic libraries, diverse and backed up record keeping, and openness to public debating and communication. It would be a horrible foundation to a dictatorship, but whatever. It’s what I prize above most other activities that are easy to enforce.
I’ve been on an archaelogical dig it was part of our Classics class, it was the Roman Palace at Fishbourne West Sussex. “Someone’s” back garden was being excavated (they bought the house to extend the Roman museum). It was kinda fun for me as a kid, although we did spend a lot of time cleaning mozaics with toothbrushes and doing nothing at all important, and when we did find something we were hurried away as the real Archaeologists descended (probably rightly so, as we had no idea what we were doing). Fascinating career my only advice is if you do want to do it, you start now, because it’s a long old path to the dig site, you’re talking at least a PhD before anyone will let you near anything of interest or let you do something of any importance. Mind you there were a few degree students who had minor roles, as I remember, but they were basically cattle to the experts. 
Paying jobs with whatever ‘qualifications’ that are needed are one thing, and even vollunteering it seems, as it seems to be as hard to become a vollunteer as it is to get paid employment. But, working in archaeoloy independantly and making signifgant contributions seems to be very possible. All subjects related to history are more than just accumulating information and making simply analysises and categorizations of it. One must be able to ‘visualize’ the big picture. That’s obvious. So what unique perspectives you can find with your less common perspective, don’t ask me, but it’s obvious that great advancements in any field are from thsoe with a unique perspective.
What I’m speaking of doesn’t have to be purley acedemic as in something to do from an office. Just an example I can think of at the moment; if you were to travel through any given area (whether a large area in a car, or smaller area walking) you would definetly be given a different impression of the changing landscape and other particulars than one with sight. Historical analysis has much to do with the types of areas that the respective events took place in.
i agree and disagree, on one account doing it as an amateur will take longer than going the academic route and you will not build up contacts or people who are in the field so easily as you will by having a vast library of information at your hands. I am not going to say don’t go the amateur route, but I would if I were you take it up seriously as a profession if you want to save time, and this is the same in any field. Unless you are Einstein and have just come up with something so revolutionary they will practically be begging you to join there think tanks, working in a patent clerk office is probably not the best way to go.
I will say this though I don’t think blindness is an issue in archaeology in some areas of the field it may actually be an advantage. One thing I found whilst digging is that all the senses came into play, you often hit something you knew was there long before you saw it. I know I am about as big an expert as Anne coulter is in politics, but you do I Think have all the sense you need to be a good archaeologist, whatever path you choose.
I like the landscape aspect of it very much. I’m quite keen on things like hiking and orienteering, though I don’t get the chance to do it these days as often as I’d like. At school we used to do it in groups, but I much prefer to do it on my own these days. You get to know the land very well and I’m sure this could be useful in archaeology.
It is very useful, just your missing the one sense you need the most for it.
Given your emphasis on Paganism you might want to go into Acoustic Archeology followed up with music theory… but the strata of paganism is going to be really old and advanced, not like the pop magic paganism of the Ptolomies worshing Isis or Serapis, or the Sun… we’re talking indepth real stuff, calculating the acoustics of ritual architecture for it’s psychological effects, which isn’t done in modern times that much beyond amplifying speakers and musical instruments from ‘the point of the prince’ that the audience would be expected to stand in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics
Don’t go in thinking you can get a university job without developing your own methods and a kick ass book before anyone hires you. Highlandwater’s points about senior archeologist taking control is true… it’s something quite common… however, if your proven in advance and trusted, a force in the intellectual circle… they will let you because they are going to be a little bit more intimidated with you… just don’t think your going to be in a hole with a spade, it’s not happening in 99% of cases.
The British isles have a few sites known for their acoustic sounds… and from my understanding you can ride a train in a tunnel to europe to check out other sites. I would write the book first, then go into the field once your confident you can pull it off.
It’s the best I can do minus screwing around with your brainwaves to insert position optical information… and I don’t think I could even do that honestly without several thousands of dollars and gouging out the eyes of animals like a preying mantis (compact eyes seem the easiest approach, eyes have evolved 30 times in nature independently, something simple like a insects eye would be the easiest I think, but none the less).
That’s a very good suggestion actually, because my interest definitely lies with the ancient pre-Christian periods, Neolithic and Bronze Age, for example, and it’s the various passage graves and other monuments, such as Stonehenge, that have been examined for their accoustic qualities. Places like Wayland’s Smithy and Newgrange spring to mind.
With regard to implants, there’s no way on earth I’d let anyone stick anything into my brain.
I studied ancient history and archaeology for some years. Jobs are not easy to get. I never had a job in it.
There are a couple or three avenues; education, cultural resource management, and legal compliance.
Obviously going back to college and teaching everything you already learned is an option for all the highest achievers. You’d also have to collect a publishing record to become a lecturer.
Cultural resources such as visitor centres, museums and so on is another area of employment.
Building construction projects have to comply with a archeological impact survey, and there is work in that area too.
Sorry to say the obvious but archeology is quite a visual medium of study, since its about digging up dead people and the stuff they threw away.
You might think so - but many digs are so popular people actually pay to get on, and many digs are funded by paying archeo-touristas.
I didn’t know that. Maybe it was just an impossible dream.
Never give up on a dream!
I’d suggest going to a museum or local history society and enquiring there as to your options.
I would have thought that these places are always open to keen and enthusiatic new-comers.
Even if it’s just helping out sorting through boxes or bags of samples (which you are probably extra-sensory specialized to do), you get to start at it.
Good luck