Do I Still Want to Be an Archaeologist?

Today I revisited Jesmond Old Cemetery to reflect on 14 years of Archaeosoup, my feelings about 'being an archaeologist' and what I want to do next...
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[@kariannecrysler640]

As kids my mother took us to picnic at cemeteries. We would walk around and tend the stones that had no one looking after them. I will enjoy seeing other things of interest in your area.

[@churchcrawling]

I really appreciate your sincerity and honesty. I work, I suppose you could say, on the fringes of a heritage circle within which archaeology can play a significant part, in some form or another. There is some overlap and I on occasion observe (from a safe distance) the challenges you are refering to. I left academia about 6 years and think there is some overlap in my grumbles about that which you mention here, especially in historical academic circles. I'm glad to keep a distance from certain aspects of such things nowadays, but remain very much interested. I sometimes think I would like to return to volunteering in community heritage projects. It's finding the time!

[@LiamsLyceum]

You have years of good content, and you started inspiring me over a decade ago. This is a lovely cemetery, we picnic in graveyards decently often.

[@94sHippie]

I feel you when you ask if you still want to be an archaeologist. Lifelong passion for the past and to uncover those mysteries about the past that archaeology is uniquely situated to answer drove me to get my undergraduate degree and masters degrees in the field, though here in the U.S. classical archaeology gets lumped into art history departments and historical archaeology gets lumped into the anthropology department so my degrees are actually art and anthropology. Here there is certainly a cliquishness to archaeology. Unless you want to get a PhD and hope that a position opens up to become an academic archaeologist, you go into CRM which is as far from academic archaeology as you can get. CRM is hard on the body and the mind, the gossiping and cliquishness you speak of becomes very noticeable when you work a phase 2 or 3 site where multiple firms are called in, and it is highly unstable work that is very hard to make a sustainable living from, and so I left the field of archaeology. But I never stopped being an archaeologist in my own mind, even as I moved into museum collections, because archaeology is a field and a job but also a whole approach to material culture, and a way of examining the world.

[@ShoppingAttic]

Graveyard site visits yes! Like this comment if you agree!! 👍👍yes, keep to your passions, what inspired you to follow this path to begin with. Show the things you get excited about, it will inspire others. Would love to see the lego stonehenge haha

[@authormichellefranklin]

Beautiful shots with the new camera! Archaelogical question: with more and more people opting for cremations, and cemetaries aging, what do you think will happen to all the old burials?

[@Archaeos0up]

Good question. I shall answer that via video!

[@authormichellefranklin]

@@Archaeos0upI AWAIT YON VID

[@jamesdecross1035]

When I look at the 'history of heritage', I see many faults since the early 1990s, whereby the archaeology sector took a set against Government over the myth of 'polluter pays principle' (which actually emerged from the OECD in 1972, not the PPG-16) which had already been contested and become the 'precautionary principle', demanding a "designed" approach to project management which the heritage sector refused to accept. Result, today = no more money. Ultimately, this is what 'Conservation Planning' demands - as adopted by the funding bodies and the heritage bodies in Wales and Scotland, but not in England, where many reports were produced, and shelved.

[@MAXCOBRALAZERFACE]

🎼 Oh what a beautiful graveyard. Oh what a beautiful tomb. The dead in the ground, they sleep so sound. 🎼…… ✌🏻

[@1220b]

Archaeology a career in ruins.