The first heritage laws - laws placing the care of ancient monuments within the purview of the federal government - are thought to have been created at the end of the French Revolution, after a debate concerning whether it was best to obliterate or preserve the architectural evidence of I’ancien regime (see Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Legislation). By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, heritage legislation included Britain’s Ancient Monuments Act of 1882 and the American Antiquities Act of 1906 (see Historic Preservation Laws).
Current Employment Trends
Since then, the growth of CRM as an employer of archaeologists has been phenomenal. Only approximately 30% of all persons employed as archaeologists are in traditional academic positions. The remainder are either in governmental jobs, protecting government-owned resources, or in private sector positions, created by the market to complete investigations as part of state and national environmental impact studies. Private sector archaeologists are typically located in small businesses or as segments of larger environmental or engineering firms. As a percentage of the total archaeological employment, local and national government roles today account for approximately 25% in the United States and Australia. In the United Kingdom, a full 45% of the working archaeologists are currently employed by either local or national government. Another large percentage of employed archaeologists today are in private sector CRM roles. Private sector jobs account for approximately one-quarter of the archaeologists employed in the United States, one-third in the United Kingdom, and nearly one-half in Australia.
Interestingly, studies continue to indicate that the majority of archaeologists working today would prefer to be engaged in teaching at the university level, even as the percentage of these roles in employing archaeologists decreases. Table 1 Lists the percentages of employment identified by four recent surveys of professional archaeologists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.
Demographics
From the beginning, most archaeologists have been male. However, recent statistics indicate a steady increase in the percentage of women participating in the field. According to recent surveys, women are still overall a minority part of the archaeological population in the United States (36%) and the United Kingdom (35.5%). However, the younger generation appears to be leveling the field. In the United States, 51% of the students surveyed were female, and in the United Kingdom, survey respondents between the ages of 20 and 29 were 42% female. Contrary to this trend, in Australia gender balance is near equal (48% female and 52% male), and there is no difference between younger and older respondents, a fact
Researchers attribute to the relative newness of the field in Australia.
Statistics indicate that the average age of an archaeologist working in the United States is approximately 50 years old, an average older than any of the other populations surveyed. Also evident in the data from these American surveys is a decrease in the number of archaeologists in each of the age groups younger than 50. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, the average age is 36 years old, and in Australia, 57.2% of the respondents in a recent survey were younger than 45 years of age. In addition, neither the British nor Australian surveys seem to indicate a sharp decrease in sheer numbers of archaeologists among younger cohorts. It is possible that, since the surveys were conducted of the memberships of professional societies, the demographic anomaly seen in the American statistics may be a function of the enrollment (or rather lack of it) in those professional societies. This should be a matter of concern to the SAA/SHA as they attempt to address its disaffected younger membership - if indeed that is what is being reflected, and not a true demographic problem. Certainly, the numbers of graduate degrees conferred increased throughout the 1990s - a point that is addressed later.
The participation of indigenous and minority people in the conduct of archaeological studies appears to be growing, but very slowly. Ethnic heritage cited in a recent survey of American archaeologists indicated that 97.9% claimed European-American ancestry, 0.1% African American, 0.3% Asian, 1.0% Hispanic (including about one-third of the total from Latin America), and 0.7% stated they were Native American. Australian archaeology appears to be better at involving indigenous people; results report that 2.3% of working archaeologists designate themselves as indigenous Australians.
It is possible to be involved in CRM without being an archaeologist, of course, and one measure of Native American participation in archaeology in the United States is the number of Tribal Historic Preservation Offices (THPOs) which have been established. THPOs are government agencies establisheD by Native American entities to manage archaeological, architectural, and cultural resources within their purviews. Of the 582 tribal entities listed in the Tribal Leaders Directory of January 2006, 59 (or 10.1%) have established THPOs, most of these within the past decade (see Native Peoples and Archaeology).
World History
