Help being an archeologist?

Question

I am a senior graduating with a degree in civil engineering, and I unfortunately a little late in my college career kind of want to switch gears a little bit and go into archeology (mainly in the middle east). The problem with going into grad school in anthropology is that I only have a measly GPA of 2.5 and i don't have time to take the GRE because I need to take the FE exam(kinda like a GRE for engineers). I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what I should do, I do have enough room to take a minor in anthropology if that helps, should I just forget it and just go the path of civil engineering? or is there a way to pursue archeology with just a civil engineering degree and POSSIBLY a minor in something.

Answer 1

In most cases, you have to get a Masters' in archaeology to be taken seriously as a professional archaeologist.  For Middle Eastern Archaeology, though, you will need a PhD because you would have to work as a museum curator or a professor-- both of which typically make much less money than a civil engineer.

You also cannot become an archaeologist by taking a few classroom courses, particularly at the undergraduate level.  You need graduate level courses in interpretive theory as well as training in excavation techniques and methods of artifact analysis.

And, to be a Middle Eastern Archaeologist, your GPA is not the only thing standing in your way. To work in that area of the world, you have to be able to read French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek, Arabic, Hebrew,  and perhaps Sanskrit and Cuneiform.  Many graduate programs expect you to have at least Greek, Latin, French, and German mastered before you start grad school.

At this point, I would recommend that you keep with the civil engineerng thing.  If you want to take some archaeology courses to broaden your horizons, then do it.

But, in all honesty, if you are going to be a civil engineer in the US, I would encourage you to take North American Archaeology and a course on archaeological ethics because it would be more useful. Say you are supervising a bridge project and workers stumble across an old Indian village and they find a burial. If you had taken both North American Archaeology and Archaeological Ethics you'd actually have a clue as to what they had found and you'd know there are laws governing how these things should be handled. Those courses would give you enough knowledge to call in people who knew more to take care of the excavations and the legal issues.

You can take a Middle Eastern course to learn about it and satisfy your own personal curiosity. But you should also pursue archaeology from a practical standpoint because the profession you are going into is often stymied by or bound up in cultural resource management and historical preservation issues.