The Complete Guide to Becoming An Anthropologist and Archeologist

Chapter 1: What Does a Anthropologist and Archeologist Actually Do?

Let's clear the air before we go any further. There will be days when you're crouched in a trench, delicate brush in hand, whisking away millennia of dirt to reveal something no human has laid eyes on since it was dropped in the mud. There will also be days when you're sitting in a fluorescent-lit office, staring at a spreadsheet of soil sample numbers, trying to figure out if the accounting department processed your travel reimbursement request from May.

Both of those days are the job. And if you want to decide whether this career is right for you, you need to understand both of them. The Hollywood version is entertainment. This chapter is the operating manual.

The first thing to know is that "anthropologist and archeologist" is not one job - it's a collection of related professions that share a common thread: the systematic study of human culture. Anthropologists tend to focus on living cultures and recent or contemporary societies, studying everything from language patterns to kinship structures to how modern cities form. Archeologists, by contrast, focus overwhelmingly on the physical remains of past societies - the stuff people left behind, from a million-year-old stone hand axe to a Colonial-era garbage pit behind a Boston tavern. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics groups them together as one occupation, and many professionals move between the two worlds over the course of a career. But if you're walking