CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
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CANADIAN PERSPECTIVES ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
Examining Archaeology as a viable Full-time Career in Canada
By: Ben Armstrong
For the past few years, archaeology as a discipline has been under renewed scrutiny as to whether or not it is capable of providing not just a personally worthwhile, but financially sustainable choice of career. With rising costs just to obtain the education and experience necessary to become a professional archaeologist, some have argued that the discipline itself is suffering from immense classism, or discrimination based on financial class (Johnson, 2014: 1). As an undergraduate student who is on the verge of graduating and being forced to examine the current state of archaeology as a career in Canada, I possess a great interest in this issue and how it applies within my country. With this in mind, I will explore the topic of archaeology as a viable career in Canada, with the intent of showing that the situation within Canada is a difficult one to assess, but seems to imply there are major issues that are not being widely discussed among academics in the discipline.
To frame this issue in both the wider and local contexts, I will begin with a brief overview of the movement known as “Free Archaeology”, and the position of archaeology in a capitalist economy. As recently as 2014 in the UK, there have been discussions taking place within archaeologist circles regarding issues of archaeology as a stable career financially (Johnson, 2014: 1). Specifically in the UK, Emily Johnson (2014: 1-2) started a debate around a Twitter discussion she created called #FreeArchaeology, which focused on discussing what she saw as a “volunteer culture” around archaeology and the expectation that students have to work for little or no money in order to even advance their careers as archaeologists. In Johnson(2014: 3)’s case, this led to many people not wanting to talk about such financial questions in a professional setting out of fear of facing reprimands for complaining, but having much more success in the more casual setting that Twitter provided for facilitating any kind of discussion. Another UK archaeologist, Samuel Andrew Hardy (2014: 1-2) has experienced career and financial difficulties in archaeology through his own experiences of being financially unable to afford to publish his works in accessible articles, and that museums have a “work for nothing” mentality existing in the “jobs” that are available for archaeologists. Looking even more publicly but still in the UK, the bio-archaeologist blogger of These Bones of Mine, David Mennear (2015), wrote a post detailing how most people graduating out of archaeology will have to work jobs in other sectors in order to hold out for their dream jobs, and many will likely experience unemployment. Thus, in the UK, there is very clearly an understanding that there are serious problems with trying to utilize archaeology as a financially stable full-time career.
I was interested in seeing if this phenomenon was prevalent beyond just the UK, and try to get some glimpse as to whether or not this is a wider issue plaguing archaeology more generally as a global occupation. So I began to search for any evidence of Canadian archaeologists facing similar employment and financial difficulties to those of our fellows in the UK. Turns out, there is an amazing set of similarities between the issues facing archaeology as financially stable full-time career in Canada as much as in Britain. On the job search site Neuvoo (2016), a search this April brought up a total of 16 jobs being offered in archaeology-related fields in Canada, mostly as field technicians, and a couple of supervisor and senior positions, with the majority of those jobs all being contract work. Another employment site, Indeed.com (2016), shows 39 different jobs across various provinces and territories in Canada, and although there is a wide range of educational and commercial positions over half do not offer salaries over $70,000 a year, and most of the highest positions require Masters or PhDs minimum in education to even be considered, though the numbers do change slightly as offers come and go almost daily. The site PayScale (2016) gave a different average salary for archaeologists by province, with archaeologists in Ontario earning roughly $51,000 annually, and archaeologists in British Columbia earning roughly $60,000 annually, though their sample sizes are extremely limited. The question of salaries is an important one, because of the fact that average annual expenses across all of Canada just 2-3 years in 2013-14 were roughly $10,000 over what more than half of those positions in 2016 were offering in salaries (Statistics Canada, 2016). These costs are shown to have increased annually, so the costs likely have only risen even higher in the intervening years (Statistics Canada, 2016). Considering the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of students across Canada study and graduate out of archaeology and anthropology programs every year, neither the number of available jobs, nor the majority of the salaries offered seem capable of consistently employing students at a full-time level that fulfills their financial needs. Thus, if students are seeking a career in Canadian archaeology, the prospects do not look promising.
This is not the only similarity between issues facing Canadian archaeologists trying to pursue their discipline as a full-time career though, for just like our fellows in the UK observed, very few people are actually discussing this problem in academic settings. The only case which I was able to find was a chapter in Ethics and Archaeological Praxis by Nicholas Zorzin (2015: 115) where he discusses commercial archaeology in Quebec as a case study in his discussion around archaeology and its relations with a capitalist economy. Zorzin (2015: 121-122) uses Quebec as an example to illustrate how neoliberal economic ideals have caused short-term contracts to become the norm in archaeology within the province, and how this has caused a negative impact in terms of young archaeologists’ hope for future career prospects and lifetime aspirations. Other than that, there is next to nothing in the form of modern academic discourse, and the amount of data that can be utilized is extremely limited. Data around average salaries and expenditures are either several years out of date, or very limited in their survey sizes to only a couple individuals making them not very reliable figures to draw conclusions from (Statistics Canada, 2016, and PayScale 2016.).
Beyond that, just trying to find average salaries of archaeologists themselves by provinces in Canada is a challenge, since neither Stats Canada, nor any other individual private website seem to have been able to get enough people from all over Canada to actually share how much money they make annually. All of this only serves to highlight what Johnson (2014: 2-3) found in the UK, which was that almost no working or professional archaeologists actually want to discuss the financial aspects of pursuing archaeology as a career in any serious setting. She attributed the silence to a fear of being unable to advance in their careers if they were caught complaining about something which had, in the eyes of many archaeologists in higher positions, become accepted as a normal process in archaeology (Johnson, 2014: 3). Whether or not that is the case here in Canada is impossible to say with any degree of certainty, but the fact that there is a lack of solid statistics, a lack of academics in Canada willing to talk about the problem in journals, and just a general lack of discussion of these issues at all make me think that it is a very real possibility.
In conclusion, archaeology as a discipline is one that inspires students all over the world to study it and seek to become archaeologists themselves, but new problems have arisen within it that question whether or not becoming an archaeologist is a financially viable career choice. With students being expected to work for free or little money in order to advance themselves, and what seems to be the new reality that most archaeologists will have to suffer through being unemployed for a large part of their early careers, the question becomes whether or not this is a localized event to one country, or a much wider and global issue in the discipline. It was with this question in mind that I started looking for information on Canadian archaeology, and its career prospects out of university in order to see what was the case here in my own local economic situation. The results were not very promising, but aligned well with the cases in the UK, with a limited number of jobs being available for new archaeologists out of university, and salaries for those positions that were mostly all significantly lower than avera-
ge annual expenditures for people in Canada. Combined with what appears to be a general lack of much desire to engage in a discussion on these disciplinary issues on an academic level and the limited or out of date statistics that are available for one to draw conclusions from, it appears to be that not many archaeologists in Canada actually want to talk about these issues in professional venues. Thus, it appears to be that there are serious issues with archaeology being a viable career to pursue in Canada, but they do not appear to be being widely discussed by local academics in the discipline.
