Parenting and Archaeology

How do you have kids and make a career work? How to make parenting and archaeology is the day’s question, not just for archaeology but arguably for everyone.

You want to have children, a family, and a regular life, yet the job you’ve been pursuing for probably 5 to 10 years does not allow for a schedule that matcheshaving kids. Going into the field for six to 10 weeks at a time becomes a much bigger challenge. For most archaeologists, I know this is a significant hurdle in pursuing a career past the initial stages of being a field technician.
People come to one of four choices. They either choose to continue to pursue archaeology and not have a family, leave the field of archaeology completely, they’re fortunate enough to have a partner with a regularly scheduled job who can be the primary parent, or they find desk work in the industry.

I know that everyone’s situation is completely different. Still, in my experience, the person that normally leaves the field is the mother or the person who gave birth. This means that the field ends up being stacked with men, and as those men rise up the ranks, they see that they can be an archaeologist and a parent at the same time and question why anyone else can’t do it.
This personally happened to me with a male supervisor who had four children. He could not understand why I could not find a balance between doing archaeology, going on field projects, and being a mother. But when I dug into this a little further, he couldn’t grasp this because his wife had been a stay-at-home parent for most of his children’s lives, and when she wasn’t a stay-at-homestay-at-home parent, she was working part-time and rarely traveling.

Mentoring

When I entered my parenting journey, I sought out other women archaeologists who were in the same situation as me. I was looking for a mentor or someone to tell me that it was possible. What I found was a lot of people who were unwilling to share how they had made it work and because the field of underwater archaeology specifically is so small there were only a few women to ask. I knew I would not pursue a Ph.D., so seeking advice or looking to the example of a mother working in academia was not an option. As adorable as it was to see the pictures of women with thier childern working next to them, that was not realistic expectation. I would be working on a boat, or under the water, not a place for kids.

Privilege

Archaeology, in general, tends to be a very privileged place, underwater archaeology even more so. Looking at the average salary range for an archaeologist, you’ll see that most jobs require a master’s degree or a Ph.D. and are still paying no more than $15 to $20 an hour. I applied to a job I was very excited about with a very high skill requirement and experience requirement after two rounds of interviews. When I finally asked about salary to find this was going to be an unpaid internship. I truly don’t know how people manage this unless you have someone else financially supporting you. That said, one of the pieces of advice that I had been given was to hire a nanny to travel with me. I was also told to get an au’pair, or have a parent into my house to help.

I knew that these suggestions came from a place of wanting to help but were totally unrealistic for the financial strain and burden that they would be placed on me. Don’t get me wrong, I love archaeology. It is truly my passion, but I can’t do it for free, and hiring a nanny to come with me would mean I was paying to work.

Now I had other hurdles that I needed to surmount because, in addition to choosing a super specific field with very limited job opportunities, I was also married to an active duty service member. I love my husband and adore him, but when the military dictates your schedule, things change quickly and you cant count on the other person. Even if he had had a regular schedule, what would I do if he got deployed or sent away for six months to a year. There was no partner for me to fall back on. There was no default parent for me to rely on. If I couldn’t figure it out, I was alone.

The same predicament plagues every woman in archaeology that I know would also like to be a mother, and it’s what drives so many women into the parts of the field that are not fieldwork. But again, suggesting that a mother find a job in a museum, write reports behind a desk, or do something else, while coming from a place of trying to be helpful, is irritating.
In my specific case, I had worked so hard and had to fight to have any kind of participation in this field. I worked full time to pay for my undergraduate education (then took 10 years to pay off loans). I worked for minimum wage during several internships. Getting to Graduate School, taking loans creating, internships for myself and constantly diversifying my skills, took tenacity and creativity. Giving up the entire dream of what I thought a career in underwater archaeology should look like, is not something that I wanted to do.

The funny thing is that this is the expectation and the norm. At the end of the day, this field is not built for people who want a life outside of it. I remember having a conversation with an archaeologist who I really admire. He basically said to me that you have to be the job that there is not room for much else and that you have to dedicate your time, energy, and love to this field if you want to advance in the way that we all pictured when we set out to do this job.
I refuse to accept this. I think that some of the best archaeologists I know are women, some of the most insightful researchers are women,, and when I’m on a site, the people who are the most creative problem solvers and best teammates are our other women.

So what is the solution? How can female archaeologists have children?

And like the advice I got from other women who had been in the field longer and had grown bitter about being asked this question, each person has to come up with their own solutions.

Here is how I make it work.

My children have been in full-time daycare since they were 12 weeks old. I have had to say no to most trips, and most fieldwork I have been able to pursue has required me to find someone to come to my home to be with my children. Or it has required scheduling months in advance to be sure my spouse would be available for the trip.

Most of my job is behind a desk and I do more project managment than actual archaeology. I only travel a couple times a year. The kids are still in full time day care, and have limited extra activities. We are calendared and scheduled to the max. I currenlty work from home part of the week and have an employeer who understands that I can not travel with out advanced notice.

I think there are other options that cultural resource management firms, the government, and universities could incorporate to make having children more reasonable. First, they could adjust schedules, and I don’t mean the nine-to-five kind of schedule; I mean the 10 days on four days off kind of schedule. I understand that a lot of time, archaeology sites are remote, and it’s expensive to transport people back and forth. Expecting somebody to be gone 10 days in a row and home four days four months at a time is unreasonable.

I also think that most archaeological companies could just be better planners. I was in a job interview at one point and the person interviewing me told me that if we needed to be in to finish a project, we would all be in no matter what. Contracts, money, and deadlines exist, but this was just unacceptable. It reeked of poor time management, poor communication with clients, and a good way to get all your employees to burnout.

Finally, I think that more employers should give the option to have family or children accompany you to field projects, specific research projects associated with universities and research institutions. I’m not sure exactly what this would look like. I have seen colleagues in other fields whose companies point them to a nanny service while in a foreign country. Other companys will give a childcare rebate. One friend was allowed to book a plane ticket with them for their family members even though their ticket is the only one paid for by the company (huge help in terms of seating and timing).

But I think the biggest shift that our field needs regarding how parenting and archaeology and childcare can work together is a culture shift. We cannot expect people to be on the job and live the job. This job is great, but for many in the U.S., history and archaeology is our job, passion, and hobby. It is already a big part of our life that we cannot be expected to give up every other part of the human experience just to work.

This brings me to my second point about a cultural shift. When we are working with students and painting a picture of what jobs are available and preparing them for the kind of work they would actually be doing, we need to be more realistic. We have to get away from the dive dive dive dig dig dig narrative for every day you spend in the field, you spend weeks in the lab, weeks writing reports and time presenting at conferences. The further you work your way up in a company, the further away from fieldwork you get, so rather than pushing the physical fieldwork aspects of this, we also should be explaining and teaching project management. Right now, to do this requires a lot of compromises, and I had to mourn a lot of those compromises. But giving a more realistic picture might make parenting and archaeology less frighting.

If I was going to suggest four things to make childcare and archaeology easier, here’s what I would suggest:

1. Figure out what it is you love about this field and this career and figure out if there is a way that you can get that fulfillment outside of fieldwork.
2. When you’re looking into having a family or becoming a parent, have a really intense conversation with your partner about what it would look like for you to keep your job in the field and for them to keep their job and career on track. What does parenting and archaeology mean to you. What can you both do together to make it easier?
3. When you’re negotiating for a job which (its easier if you’re not entry-level when you’re getting ready to have children) ask about childcare savings plan similar to a health savings plan. This is an account that your company can set up for you where they pull money from your paycheck before it is taxed to go toward childcare expenses.
4. Finally, ask people and your colleagues about a company or job you are looking at and how family-friendly that company is. I have seen companies rated as the most family-friendly. Then when you talk to their actual employees they are far less than supportive to parents. One compay rated the ‘most family friendly’ was paid so little that at least one of their techs was living out of her car. This was a position that wanted 3 years of experince and a Masters.

A few other suggestions. When you’re interviewing, decide if you want to tell them you’re a parent or not, with the full knowledge that many companies will discriminate against you for being a parent. In some cases, I have ommited that I’m a parent until later in the hiring process. I wanted them to see I was capable, but also set reasonable expectations with my potential employer about what I would need to be successful for them. For me to be a successful employee and a successful parent, I need flexibility. I need sick days because my kids get sick at school, I need advance notice of travel because I have to arrange care, and I need an understanding that sometimes I will choose my children over the job.

Good luck my friends. Know that there are other mothers and parents that can support you. We have to be here for one another. If you need support please reach out to me or other women/parents you might know. I belive in helping and supporting people coming into the field.

You can read more about my parenting journey here.

Here are some awesome papers about mothering and archaeology.