As a senior in highschool, I am in need of some career advice.

>>17501101
yes its a real job, but it mainly exists in academia rather than the private sector. That means you'll need to go to grad school and become an archaeology professor even if you only want to work in the field.

Unfortunately I have no advice except try to find some cool stuff, and when you find it thank /adv/

>>17501112
Could I make good money with a BA in Archeology, Anthropology, or History, by becoming an archeologist?

>>17501129
what's your definition of good money? Becoming an academic is expensive and time consuming and in the end doesn't really pay all that much.

>>17501101

(Part 1/2)

2015 archaeology grad here:

First thing, >>17501112 is wrong-ish. Archaeology that you get paid for is split into two categories, Academic and Cultural Resource Management (CRM), which can overlap with one another. Academic archaeologists also carry out field and laboratory research in addition to having some kind of teaching schedule.

Academic is by and large museum positions and professorships. CRM exists, in the US at least but to an extent globally, because of federal and state law. Any time a building project is done that uses any amount of state or federal money, a number of different surveys have to be done about the potential impact. One of these required surveys is archaeological. There are contracting firms that bid on these opportunities and whoever wins sends out a team to do an initial survey, usually a metric-fuckton of test pits, and then writes up a report. If they find something of significance, the project could possibly be delayed based on the findings and a more elaborate dig could commence to determine the extent of what could potentially be disturbed/destroyed.

Anon above is wrong because the vast majority of archaeology jobs are private, they're the jobs with those CRM firms. Mind you, most of these positions are so called "shovel bums" but most CRM firms require these shovel bums to have a Bachelor's degree (and a certified dig school experience) and so in a strict numbers comparison there are A LOT more CRM jobs than academic jobs.

>>17501101
>2020
Try 2027. That's being generous. After you major at the undergraduate level in some combination of classics, archaeology, anthropology, etc. you will then go to graduate school for seven years to earn your doctoral degree. Then you will fight tooth and nail to earn a university appointment and then as they say on /ck/ 'wala' you've become an academic archaeologist and you'll lead digs. That's if you're lucky and you've not had to do a postdoctoral fellowships or appointment.

[spoiler]I almost did this[/spoiler]

>>17501101
Coming from someone who's gone to feel school and spends a lot of time around professional archeologist, you pay to work for free, and then you work for free, and then after a few years and graduate school you're finally paid for your work. It's not an easy job, nor a profitable job. You'll never be rich. It's fun, a hell of a lot of fun, but it's fist to mouth living man.

>>17501236
>Feel school
I'm sorry I've been drinking. FIELD school.

>>17501211

(Part 2/2)

Now, all that in mind: getting work as even a shovel bum at a CRM firm can be extremely dicey and it's no cakewalk.

Average hourly pay is about $15 and the firms will either give you a daily additional payment of $30-50 to, supposedly, cover hotel costs, food costs, etc. or, much more rarely, pay for your hotel room outright.

And that is where we hit the big catch of being a CRM shovel bum: your job security sucks and you're constantly driving around some portion of the country trying to catch your next 2-8 weeks of work. California and the Southwest tend to have the most work from what I see, the South/Midatlantic isn't bad either, the Upper Midwest had a bunch because of frakking but I think a lot of that has tapered off, and New England is as good as dead.

The nature of the CRM shovel bum life burns out a lot of people. I've run into more than a few people who got a BA, thought they were going to be able to handle shovel bumming for the long haul, and simply got burned out by it within a handful of years.

Now, of course, you're probably wondering "What if I get an MA or a Ph.D?" well, your odds get better and worse. In both Academia and CRM, there simply are not that many curatorial or primary investigator (PI) roles. A lot, if not most, museums are barely keeping it together on shoestring budgets backed by enthusiastic volunteer teams. The museum I volunteered with while getting my degree had 3 year-round paid staff members (including the curator) and 20+ volunteers keeping the archaeology department running. To boot, the curator still wasn't making anything too great of a salary. Similar problems exist in CRM firms. The salaried MAs/Ph.Ds are massively outnumbered by the shovel bums hired on essentially as contractors for the extent of the pertinent excavation.

>>17501269

(ended up needing a third)

My recommendation to you? Give up on archaeology as a profession or a career. There are drastically more archaeologists graduating at every level (BA, MA, Ph.D) every year than there are jobs being created for all of them. Instead, volunteer summers with museum digs, they're happy to teach people the basics and happy to have people along. Or work as a docent with a museum or volunteer with the National Parks Service, there's a lot of ways to spend your free time doing all this stuff and like I said above, it's the volunteers keeping a lot of this stuff open to the public at this point.

As much as I love archaeology (dig school was the best four weeks of my life) and history, I regretted what I'd gotten myself into (I was aware of everything I'm telling you while I was a senior in high school too and thought I could be one of the people to beat the odds) while still in college and only regret it more now.

If you're absolutely dead set on giving this a whirl, I can offer what I have heard from others in CRM and my professors about what tends to better people's odds, but I think I've rambled on enough for the moment.

>>17501293
by all means continue rambling, it beats my advice that had no actual first hand knowledge

>>17501101
>is becoming an archeologist as of, say 2020 a good idea?
in 2016? no, in 2287, yes
> will the salary be comfortable?
pfffhahaha, no.
>Do you have advice for an aspiring Archeologist?
anthropology, sociology, geology, and writing. get on that shit.