07 April 2008

What is everyday work for an archaeologist?

Normally, archaeologist excavates. In some private archaeology companies, there are two different kind of archaeologist: One in the field and one in front of the table.

In the universities, scholars excavate only in the summer when the universities are in the summer vacation. Then archaeologists come to the laboratories and start analyzing the materials. After this process archaeologist should write one or more articles to share his/her research results with the scientific society and the public.

One of the most important part of archaeologist's work is to read. Because, as a scientist archaeologists must keep their information up to date about other sites and new discoveries.

In a normal excavation, just one campaign lasted about a month, you can collect tons of things to analyze. There are different specializations among the archaeologists, such as lithic, pottery, metal atc. specialists, archaeozoologists and archaeobotanists. So everybody analyze the different material. One should collect everybody's work and put the things together in a publication.

So there are a lot of work to do, even you don't excavate everyday...

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