How to identify historic properties using Google Earth
Don’t you just love it when you get a PDF of a project area floating in the middle of some unidentified terrain? Just a polygon overlain upon some barren desert, forest quadrat, or urban freeway with...
View ArticleCan the Plentitude Business Model save cultural resource management?
Historic preservation-minded developer Bill Naito didn’t just save buildings. He helped create ambiance, character, and augmented the quality of life in downtown Portland, Oregon. During the 1960s,...
View ArticleDoes archaeology hate mothers?
I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the @everyDIGsexism conversation on Twitter. The discussion highlights many of the problems women face in cultural resource management and academic archaeology....
View ArticleFind the township and range of your cultural resource management archaeology...
Time is money in cultural resource management archaeology. Sometimes, field archaeologists and GIS specialists have strained relationships within their CRM companies because field archaeos do not...
View ArticleGetting your archaeology PhD in a world of stupid politicians
This is a summary of what I learned from my second year as an archaeology PhD student. Sometimes it feels like the world is falling down around us and the only light at the end of the tunnel comes from...
View ArticleThe difference between archaeology journal articles and blog posts
Some people drive cars festooned with bumper stickers. It seems like, in the West, more than half of the cars and trucks traveling our roads have at least one. A few of us have covered our cars in...
View ArticleComing out of my Shell: Lessons learned by doing public archaeology
For a person who is building a career based on the study of human beings, I have to confess: I really don’t like other people. The main problem with other people is they aren’t me. They have their own...
View ArticleWhen will cultural resource management archaeology go paperless?
I’ve heard most of the arguments against going paperless in cultural resource management archaeology and I can tell you the risks far outweigh the benefits: Doesn’t it take more time to record sites...
View ArticleYes, we can scrap the paper in cultural resource management archaeology
I once heard a story about paper and archaeology that I will never forget. A close friend told me that she once worked at an emergency data recovery project in Arizona where a prehistoric village had...
View ArticleCultural resource management and the Day of Archaeology 2015
Last week, I witnessed my third #dayofarch and was pleasantly surprised to see the prominence of blog posts about a number of great cultural resource management archaeology projects happening around...
View Article7 Essential Archaeology Field Office Tools: Summer 2015
The River Street Archaeology Project ended earlier this month. It was a bittersweet moment for me because: I was working in my home town I worked with friends, acquaintances, and family that I love...
View ArticleHow to ruin your archaeology job search
My wife isn’t an archaeologist but she is a hiring manager. She uses the same processes to hire new employees as nearly every archaeology company (except her job doesn’t use the hidden job market as...
View ArticleNavigating the Archaeology Job Hiring Funnel
In my experience, most cultural resource management companies do not like to hire new employees. New hires take time to get up to speed. A CRM archaeology PI once told me it takes 18 months to two...
View ArticleIs it an archaeologist’s job to educate racist construction crews?
This week, a discussion was sparked on the Facebook Archaeo Field Techs’ Group (FYI: If you’re an archaeologist or an aspiring one and you have a FB account, you need to join this group. It’s an...
View ArticleBeing an Archaeological Field Technician: The Truth
(This is a guest post distilled from conversation threads created by the active and experienced members of two cultural resource management archaeology Facebook groups: the “North American...
View ArticleWarning: Do Not do Paperless Archaeology
In the book Small Archaeology Project Management, I described a day when I let my entire crew’s shovel probe forms get soaked in the rain. A whole week’s work was compromised. The result wasn’t pretty....
View ArticleWhen to turn down an archaeology job
Last week I helped a friend and peer get a good shot at her first job in cultural resource management archaeology. She’d just finished her anthro B.A. and I worked with her this summer. I quickly...
View ArticleNational Register determinations and CRM archaeological thought
I am in the process of creating an online course focused on Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). Even though I’ve been doing cultural resource management archaeology for over a...
View ArticleWhy Matt Damon is the best historical archaeologist in the universe
I just got done watching “The Martian” and, seeing how I’m a Matt Damon fan already, I liked it. But, then again, I pretty much always like any science-based movies depicting humans colonizing other...
View ArticleWhat the NPS junior ranger program can teach CRMers
Who would have ever thought a 5-year-old would be enthusiastic about seeing a pile of rocks in the desert? No toys. No playground. Just an 800-year-old archaeological ruin…and a little sister. This...
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