My first CRM project as a paid Archaeologist

I haven't written a blog post in over a year, and coincidentally, I have not participated in an excavation since then. I'm sure my posts on archaeological monitoring would have been riveting- like that glorious day during which I got to stop the dig crew for a full ten minutes as I documented a 10 cm stratum of re-deposited shell midden. Boy, did I feel like the keeper of the resources that day. Or the countless hours spent digging shovel test probes, analyzing soil profiles, and report writing. Most of my archaeology work over the past year has not been exceedingly blog-worthy, but I would like to share the story of my first real-life, grown-up, paid archaeology field work project.

I got a part-time job at a small Cultural Resources Management Firm out of Bellingham, Washington through a former professor of mine. Due to the nature of CRM work, often on-call and completely dependent on intermittent contract projects, I also worked part-time in a zooarchaeology lab at my former university.

My first contract job was a county storm water improvement project in Birch Bay, a 30 minute drive out of Bellingham near the Canadian border. I drove out to the project area, which was on a little side street off of the main road that wound around Birch Bay. At 7am the sun was just rising and the fall air was crisp and cool. Hundreds of Canadian geese flocked on the glassy, fog covered water. I unloaded my gear and made my way over to the excavation area. A huge excavator churned out large amounts of dirt with each bucket, such that I had to carefully watch and observe the trench profile as it was being dug so not to miss any changes in soil.

I had a solid background in archaeological theory and some formal excavation, but I was quick to realize that monitoring was very different. I had to pick up a whole new lingo from the world of contracting, engineering, and construction, and I had to learn it immediately on the job in order to know what was going on during a day’s work. My new boss had told me stories about novices making inadvertent discoveries of human remains on their first few days of cultural resource monitoring- it seemed to be the newbie’s curse. So, I felt that as long as I didn’t find any human remains or miss any culturally significant soils, then I would be doing ok on my first day.

I relaxed into the job over the course of the day, writing notes, drawing profiles, and doing photo documentation, making conversation with county employees, city employees, and contractors. I didn’t find any human remains or prehistoric soils on that first day.

I was the only female in the field that day and for most days on the project. I think it is a pretty typical situation for female archaeologists on monitoring projects, given the high ratio of males in the construction and engineering fields.  I can confidently report that I always felt welcomed on the project on a personal level. Sometimes, however, the archaeology portion of my job would be subtly ridiculed for a few reasons.

The first is that when you monitor for archaeology in a place that has been heavily graded or plowed in historic times, it is not highly probable that an archaeologist will find intact deposits or artifacts. So, the archaeologist’s presence at all can be jokingly voided by some project employees, even though it is a legal necessity if the permitting agency requires it.

The second stems from the first, which is the fact that if an archaeological resource is found, the project is put on hold indefinitely until the appropriate action can be taken to mitigate the resource in question. This can take a good deal of time depending on the mitigation required, and a lot of time lost for the project. It is in everyone else’s best interest but the archaeologist if no archaeological resources are found.

I found it best to have a light attitude while doing a thorough job, and had an excellent work experience on what will always be my first CRM archaeology project.