Bonesgirl Wrote:P Prentice, am I right from reading your post that what your basically saying is unless we are archaeologists before we embark on a long, hard degree we're never going to be archaeologists??? Cause I'm sorry but I beg to differ, if that was the case then why would there be such degrees, if not to train future archaeologists???
This is going to sound snide but to answer your question, to employ professors }
. Ask most "academic" archaeologists who teach and their response about training is %#*(% that, we don't train practical skills we "teach people how to think". They don't do that very well in my opinion but that is beside the point. I just ran the numbers (forth coming PP report) and with dropout rates of archaeologists there are only about 200-300 new openings a year with thousands of new graduates each year. You are actually looking at 5-10% might get an archaeology job (note I am not saying become an archaeologists as diggers are out after less than 5 years and that is mainly how you get new entrants). Now this is bad because in the last five years we have lost about 1/3 of the workforce. However, even before that with pretty spectacular growth in the decade before, almost doubling numbers, there were still more new students than jobs by wide margins. In defense to universities the vast majority of their archaeology students will never have an archaeology job. Prince Charles has an archaeology degree that he has never used. To be fair to universities by teaching general fluff the universities are actually training you for what you're most likely going to be doing (I will leave it to others to insert comments about that), although at a very high price.
What archaeology needs is a person or organization (not necessarily a university) to actually take the time to train those 200-300 new archaeologists (with actually training that number would probably drop to 100) how to be an archaeologist in all the possible choices- not just how to dig, archaeology offers so many other possibilities too.
The problem that you, and most new archaeologists have, is a disconnect between reality and expectations. The people you paid, or depending when and where you went to school the government paid, to tell you these things failed. In all honesty they don't really know anyways but some of it is 'seeing, speaking, hearing no evil' especially when you are keeping them employed. The system failed you in that it led you to believe that university = archaeology when university = general fluff.
Does this mean you won't be an archaeologists, absolutely not. You are going the right thing by posting here and asking questions that = archaeology. Keep it up and at some point you will be employed as an archaeologist.