The Next Academic Generation in Archaeological Scholarship

As high school progressed and people asked what I wanted to study in college, I looked to my class schedule for some guidance.  I knew I didn’t want to spend my life doing a job I hated and waiting for retirement, so I asked myself: "What school subject do I wake up excited for?"  Apart from early morning choir practices, the answer was history.  My next question was, “Can I make history into a job?”  Through research I found archaeology, a field that did not just study the past but made it come into being, a field that actively sought to answer questions and set the record straight.  It involves reading, research, debating and the chance to travel - I was sold.  I started my freshman year of college with confidence and have never altered my course.  It's made me stressed and sometimes discouraged but it still gives me the happiness it always has.  Along this path, I’ve made a few observations about this field and one of these is about gender.  

Halfway through my undergraduate years, I had spent one semester working at an archaeological museum and was on my way to work a third summer season at a site on the Mediterranean coast.  My trench mates that year were few in number and a wonderful bunch.  We got to know each other pretty well, including our supervisors.  The latter were two men from a prestigious university who were a pleasure to work under and learn from.  Early on in the season, I expressed my desire to learn more and soon my duties expanded to taking the on-site notes and locus elevations - basically assistant supervising.  One day the two supervisors were going to finish some work in the area while the volunteers were washing pottery and I was asked to join.  I was thrilled to be included! It felt like I had proven myself to be more than a volunteer.  The three of us got out to the area and started working and it suddenly dawned on me that I was a young, female college student in a hole in the ground with these two men - that’s it.  I thought back to an article I had read on sexual assault at dig sites and my rape-anxiety instincts kicked in, even though I knew both of these men well enough to know that I had nothing to fear.  Everything was fine, we got the work done and went back to our accommodations.  However, the experience left me thinking about what genders I saw in the different positions of power in the field.  

I returned to my university and resumed my job at the museum.  With these thoughts still rattling around in my brain, I looked around the museum and the university department I was a part of.  The museum was highly female-dominated.  My superiors were all women and generally young (and I will add, with a great deal of expertise in their field).  The museum had one male employee - another student who was also the only male student in my year studying archaeology.  Then I looked at my department's faculty - predominately male, old and young.  But the graduate and undergraduate populations in the department - predominately female (I say predominately in both cases because both genders were represented while one dominated the other in numbers).  So, the situation is this: there is a department, mostly male, mentoring a new scholarly generation, mostly female.  I look out on the field as a whole and though it is not true in every sub-field of archaeology/ancient history, the current academic generation I see, the parenting generation with their tenured professorships, is male, just like the generation before it and the one before that.  From my perspective it looks like a shift from male to female dominance in archaeology is happening.  Though there have been waves of female archaeologists and scholars in the past (I know of many such female scholars), the trend seems to indicate that the number of males in the field will decrease with female students, the mentees, taking the places of their professors.  

Will every Near Eastern Studies/Anthropology/Art History/Archaeology/Classics department be headed by a female scholar in the next 10-20 years? Will I and my female peers continue to pursue our work and get these appointments?  As a feminist (aka someone who believes in gender equality), I believe that jobs should be given to the most qualified regardless of gender.  But based on the numbers, things are trending toward female dominance if no preferential treatment is given to one side or the other.  Statistics show that a higher percentage of women are studying humanities (see links below), though not as pronounced as I have seen in my experience, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.  In a recent article, “Choosing a Path to the Ancient World in a Modern Market: The Reality of Faculty Jobs in Archaeology,” Dr. Robert Speakman et al. discuss the struggle many recent archaeology graduate students have finding employment in academia.  Their statistics show that in the last 15 years, men are more likely to be hired at higher level institutions than women despite the fact that since the late 1980s, “the number of female doctorates has increased to the point where there are now two female doctoral graduates in anthropology for every male.”  Their paper concludes that any student's chances of high level employment (i.e. as a faculty member at a university) depends on the quality of one’s graduate program and the reputation of one’s advisor.  However, this does not explain why females have not been hired more often in the recent past.  

With this in mind, what can we expect the next generation of archaeological scholars to look like?  Will there be a bias one way or another? I would be the last to advocate for a system that makes gender identity a more important job qualification than one’s expertise, but what can be done to get more women hired to high level positions?  Are women not choosing programs and advisors that are not prestigious enough? Are hiring institutions biased against them?  This is a place for discussion, so please feel free to make comments.  I have no answer for this question and would love to hear from other voices, even to tell me I’m wrong.



Further discussion: This subject branches into another issue, race and ethnicity of the scholars in our field.  (Possible topic for later blog post)



Statistical Data:



Works Cited:

Speakman, R., Hadden, C., Colvin, M., Cramb, J., Jones, K., Jones, T., . . . Thompson, V. (2018). CHOOSING A PATH TO THE ANCIENT WORLD IN A MODERN MARKET: THE REALITY OF FACULTY JOBS IN ARCHAEOLOGY. American Antiquity, 83(1), 1-12. doi:10.1017/aaq.2017.36 


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