What I was advocating earlier in this thread is the idea that archaeologists must set the value of our work as something other than the cost (in money and speed) of our work. While CRM archaeologists work in an industry mandated and created by laws and regulations that can feel wobbly for us (who among us doesn't worry, from time to time, that the public will turn on us and demand revocation of those laws and regs?), we are, in fact, an established part of the national, state, and local processes of considering the impacts of land-altering activities on a variety of environmental "resources" and circumstances. There is value in what we do and that value is not the same as the costs. As long as we allow the value of our work to be determined by the costs we continue to find ourselves in the big-box-discount-store situations where good is defined both by meeting minimal regulation requirements and by being cheap and fast; therefore our value is found in trying to be good, cheap, and fast, some sacrifices will be made, and, I have to concur with Conrad here although I don't think I'm nearly as pessimistic, good is what is sacrificed most often when it involves efforts beyond minimal requirements.
In contrast to Conrad's position, though, I have to interject that a major part of what we do obtain, even from minimalist CRM (assuming it's done well), is data on what's out there. Of course we all want more than that because we want to be doing more than really-old-school salvage archaeology (I have a 2003 photo of two crews working in the midst of an active highway construction zone trying to grab what was exposed after old paving was removed and before new paving was laid down that makes that point for me). At the same time we all complain that our academic colleagues often don't make enough use of the "gray literature" because we know just how much data are in there. My point is not to hammer that issue but to point out that, whether we think it's enough and whether it is, indeed, enough, we get to look where we might not have looked otherwise (how many years have I spent surveying along the side of highways or in blocks of sagebrush land planned for subdivisions?) and we get to look at stuff we might not have looked at otherwise (I'm now writing up a truly unique site--nothing like it has been found before in the Northern Rio Grande--that we found in a parking lot scheduled to be included in a highway overpass). Indeed, in New Mexico, we know more about Spanish Colonial archaeology and late 19th-early 20th century archaeology and their respective historical and ethnohistorical records because of CRM than we could have hoped to learn otherwise.
So, my point is that there is value in what we do and it extends beyond the exigencies of legal requirements. Therefore it falls upon us to identify that value (those values?) by, at least in part, defining what constitutes "good" CRM beyond minimalist requirements. In doing so, we can encourage our clients to consistently select good as one of the two most important variables and we can then do good archaeology either cheap or fast. In the end, this has to be an industry effort based on industry consensus about the value of our work.
It is in this setting, I contend, that CRM companies and agencies can best provide adequate or even more than adequate salaries and other benefits for their staff. We might never get paid like lawyers and doctors and hedge fund CEOs but we cannot expect our work to have value in terms of what we get paid until we are willing and able to define value in what we do and insist on the compensatory nature of that value.
Jeff
Jeffrey L. Boyer, RPA
Supervisory Archaeologist/Project Director
Office of Archaeological Studies, Museum of New Mexico
* The Center for New Mexico Archaeology
* 7 Old Cochiti Road
* Santa Fe, New Mexico 87507
* tel: 505.476.4426
* e-mail: [log in to unmask]
"There comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure." -- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
________________________________________
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Jim [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2013 10:09 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Positions Available - Pay
Conrad's comments notwithstanding, I think we moved quickly away from Julie's circumstance, which is a grant-funded project not intended to provide employment. The issue is fair compensation for archaeologists, particularly, but not exclusively, those just beginning or considering the field as a career. I can speak most knowledgeably about commercial archaeology, although I've pulled a stint or two as an adjunct professor at several colleges in which the pay rate was a fraction of the combined pay and benefits offered full-time faculty to teach the same courses.
In commercial archaeology, significant amounts of money get sucked up in overhead and profit, and the pay difference between management and labor can be very wide. Government funded projects are particularly expensive, and yet the field and lab people who staff them probably earn less than the folks who work on my small private sector jobs. A more eqitable arrangement no doubt is possible. I think we need more ideas about how to increase the material rewards of professional archaeology, because, in the end, job satisfaction doesn't pay for housing and doesn't keep the pantry full. Keeping rates low means only those with other sources of income or wealth can afford to be practicing archaeologists, and we will revert to the elitist discipline we once were. And we will lose talent that we sorely need. My current business model grew out of frustration in not being able to hold on to some very talented staffers.
I'd like to hear some of those ideas in this continuing thread.
James G. Gibb
Gibb Archaeological Consulting
2554 Carrollton Road
Annapolis, Maryland USA ?? 21403
443.482.9593 (Land) 410.693.3847 (Cell)
www.gibbarchaeology.net ? www.porttobacco.blogspot.com
On 09/15/13, Martha Zierden<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It appears to me that Dr. King has developed a very interesting research
project and has managed to raise X amount of money. Folks can choose to
apply for the positions, or not.
On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Conrad Bladey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It saddens me as a professional to see minimalist presence or absence
> archeology dominating the field- in the future it will be viewed as only
> minimally better than pot hunting- availability of funding has not brought
> more science but less-I can't count the number of crm style report
> presentations which were totally devoid of anthropology. It is all just
> look what we found. And as pointed out here crew pay does not qualify as
> real employment-at this point reset calls for less money rather than
> more-there is no way money can ever be found to do adequate work-archeology
> needs to be a public life way -not just a profession-we have not made the
> same progress as the ecological movement -largely due to professional
> snobbery-I have already posted out the waste of funds by professionals-a
> significant problem exists with the exploitation of volunteers for profit
> taking-the entire field needs rebuilding-
>
> Conrad Bladey
>
> Thank you in advance for your prompt response!
>
>
> On Sep 15, 2013, at 7:58 AM, Jim <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >
> > For what it is worth, I have occasional recourse to a quip when my
> clients try pressuring me: archaeology is like dentistry; rushing it could
> prove painful.
> > That said, I've found most of the postings on this subject to be
> client-focused. It's a little like writing about generals and generalship
> without regard for the people who actually fight the battles.
> > Is it possible that a well-paid crew, loyal to employers they know put
> their health, welfare, and future first, perform better and help produce
> products that are good, fast, and cheap? Certainly that has been my
> experience, but I dare not extrapolate from a sample of one, and an
> admittedly biased sample at that.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > James G. Gibb
> >
> > Gibb Archaeological Consulting
> >
> > 2554 Carrollton Road
> >
> > Annapolis, Maryland USA ?? 21403
> >
> > 443.482.9593 (Land) 410.693.3847 (Cell)
> >
> > www.gibbarchaeology.net ? www.porttobacco.blogspot.com
> >
> > On 09/14/13, Boyer, Jeffrey, DCA<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Many years ago, a colleague and friend taught me the basic equation of
> contracting: "Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two."
> > This holds whether one is getting a house built or a site dug in front
> of the bulldozers. I have to say, with sincere apologies to Chico Escuela,
> "Archaeology been berry berry good to me," but "berry berry good" has not
> always included a salary equivalent in value (in my mind) to knowledge and
> experience. I know very few archaeologists who are not or have not been
> willing to start at the bottom and work up but we all know we'd like to get
> paid up as we work up.
> > What most of us run into over and over and over with private and public
> sector clients is their apparent desire to get all three and, if not, to
> get cheap and fast. Looking at it from the client side, as that same
> colleague and friend showed me, what they need and, therefore, want from us
> is a document or set of documents confirming that their planning and
> development process met the relevant, necessary legal requirements. As all
> CRMers know, or better figure out, our branch of
> archaeology-as-a-profession is a branch created by laws and regulations,
> without which client-driven archaeology would not be full of grads and
> post-grads looking for work. An industry created and maintained by laws and
> regulations has the feeling of being pretty wobbly and justifiably so given
> the see-saw fluctuations in public political will. We work, those of us on
> the client-driven side of archaeology, in an industry required by law and
> regulation and for our clients the ultimate product are thos
> e
> >
> >
> > legal documents that allow them to proceed with whatever they have
> planned. In that environment, is it any wonder that the primary
> requirements for selecting some of us over others of us are cheap and fast?
> Good is great until it impacts cheap and fast in ways that lead to more
> expensive and slower.
> > My son, a born entrepreneur if ever there was one, contends that
> contractors -- he is one, in an entirely different profession, one that I
> would think would wax and wane a lot with financial vicissitudes but which
> actually keeps him not only very busy but doing quite well at it -- must
> set for themselves and for their clients the difference between cost and
> value. Admittedly, in his profession, good is the primary goal of most
> clients but cheap and fast are highly desirable. His challenge, then, is to
> help his clients see that good is not a matter of cheap or fast or a matter
> separate from cheap and fast, but a matter of value, that there is
> considerably more value in the expertise and, therefore, the product of
> someone who is good, and that value is sacrificed when buried beneath cheap
> and fast. As he tells me frequently (paraphrasing), "Almost anyone can do
> what I do. Hardly anyone can do it the way I do it. That's my value in the
> situation. Are potential clients concerne
> d
> >
> >
> > with the value of my experience and expertise? If so, then they become
> clients. If not, then they don't. I'm not interested in having clients who
> aren't interested in the value of my experience and expertise and can't or
> won't see that value reflected in how good my work is." His mother and I
> have been very concerned about what appears to be an elitist business model
> -- "Can you afford to turn down clients?" we have often asked in fear for
> the security of his business -- but, we have to admit, it works well for
> him.
> > The other side of that model is epitomized by those situations, with
> which we are all familiar, in which contractors underbid all competition
> and either 1) produce results that are not good, to their own detriment and
> that of the rest of us, and end up blackballed (and hopefully go out of
> business or change their ways) because their work is so shoddy, or 2) go
> out of business trying to do good, cheap, and fast all at once and ending
> up taking financially impossible losses on contract fees.
> > Since one can only select two of the three aspects of contracting, and
> since, with precious few exceptions, pretty much all of us want to do good
> work, work that contributes to understanding the human past as well as work
> that provides our clients with their necessary legal documentation, I
> suspect that my son is right and we must, ourselves, identify value in our
> experience, our expertise, and our capability, helping our clients
> understand that value -- contrary to discount-store advertising -- is not
> found exclusively in cheap and fast, that they get value when we are
> allowed to work with them to identify what is good and find appropriate,
> relevant ways to balance that with cost and speed. After all, who knows
> more about what is good work than the people who do good work? The client
> might well identify the scope of work but we can and should identify the
> value of work: we know what it takes, how long it takes, and how much it
> should cost to generate a consistently good pr
> od
> >
> >
> > uct and that is our value. If we don't, then it's time to find another
> profession.
> >
> >
>
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