EXPOSED
The modal worker here is not a tenured ethnographer but a cultural resource management archeologist doing Section 106 compliance: pedestrian survey, shovel testing, artifact cataloging, and grinding out technical reports. The field half — walking transects, digging test units, reading soil profiles, handling and identifying artifacts in situ — is genuinely hard to automate, while the desk half (literature and archival review, site form completion, boilerplate report sections, coding interview transcripts) is exactly what language models do cheaply now. What holds value is the signed judgment call: whether a site is eligible for the National Register, what mitigation is adequate, and how to run tribal and community consultation.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $63,670 → $70,770 -11.1% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+3.7% 8,800 → 9,200 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +3.7% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 51/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~800 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
ExcavatorResearcherEthnologistArcheologistEgyptologistInvestigatorArchaeologistAnthropologistPolicy SpecialistEthnoarchaeologistField ArchaeologistProject ArchaeologistApplied AnthropologistMedical AnthropologistResearch ArchaeologistForensic AnthropologistPhysical AnthropologistResearch AnthropologistHistorical ArchaeologistPolitical AnthropologistPublic Policy SpecialistCultural Resources SpecialistCultural Resources TechnicianApplied Cultural Anthropologist
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Shovel testing on a 15-meter grid, calling a feature versus a rodent burrow off a soil profile, and identifying diagnostic lithics or sherds in the screen keep this above a 6, but the other half of the billable week — SHPO site forms, background archival review, environmental setting and prior-research report sections, coding ethnographic transcripts — is template text an LLM drafts in minutes, which is why it sits at 11 rather than 15.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Pedestrian survey means walking transects through brush, cutbanks, swamp margins and construction corridors in whatever weather the project schedule falls in, hauling screens, and excavating units by hand — uncontrolled outdoor work that earns 13 — while it stops short of 17+ because a meaningful share of the year is lab cataloging and report writing at a desk, and field seasons are bounded by client schedules.
Certification preferred, not legally required There is no state licence to practice archeology; the gate is the Secretary of the Interior's Professional Qualifications Standards (36 CFR 61) plus state permits and RPA registration, which are credentials an agency checks before issuing a permit rather than a personal licence that can be revoked and sued against — real friction on who may sign a Section 106 report, but not the personal exposure of a PE or physician, hence 8.
Meaningful discretion Recommending a site eligible or not eligible for the National Register under 36 CFR 60.4 determines whether a project stops, redesigns, or pays for data recovery, and NAGPRA calls on inadvertent discoveries are irreversible — high stakes with genuine ambiguity, but the decision framework is codified in criteria, state guidance and standard mitigation menus, and the agency official makes the final determination, which caps it at 12.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (11/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (8/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (12/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 27 of this occupation's 51 points (53%).
Embodiment (13/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 65/100, still EXPOSED.
Growth in tribal consultation weight — NAGPRA's 2023 revised regulations gave descendant communities explicit deference over disposition and require documented consultation. If consultation becomes the binding gate on project schedules (as it increasingly is on pipeline and transmission permitting), the role's core becomes an accountable negotiator whose calls carry named responsibility for delay and litigation exposure.
Task-mix shift: this occupation genuinely has two tiers. If literature review, site-form population, and boilerplate report drafting are automated out, what remains is eligibility determination under ambiguous integrity criteria, in-situ soil and feature interpretation, and consultation. The remaining hours are disproportionately the hard tier — watch for CRM firms billing fewer report-production hours at flat field-hour counts.
State Historic Preservation Offices and the ACHP tightening who may sign Section 106 determinations — e.g. formal adoption of the Secretary of the Interior's Professional Qualification Standards as a hard signature requirement (rather than guidance) in state review rules, plus state-level archaeologist licensure of the kind Nevada, Arkansas and Texas permitting regimes approach, with named-principal liability for inadequate survey. Also plausible: agency rules barring AI-generated report text in submitted determinations without a qualified professional's attestation, mirroring the affidavit rules courts have adopted for AI filings.
Rises only if survey standards move toward more intensive hand excavation rather than less — e.g. state standards mandating shovel-test intervals or hand-excavated test units where lidar/geophysics/remote sensing would otherwise substitute, or SHPO refusal to accept remote-sensing-only Phase I coverage in specified soil contexts.
The limit. Trust premium has no plausible route: the buyer is a permit applicant buying regulatory clearance at lowest cost, not a human archaeologist. Demand is also downside-exposed — NEPA/Section 106 streamlining (2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act amendments, categorical exclusions, permitting-reform bills) could cut the compliance work that supports most of these 8,990 jobs regardless of how the dimensions score. Academic positions are a small and shrinking share and offer no shield.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 540 | $65,240 -8% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 350 | $75,480 +7% |
| Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, AZ | 270 | $63,010 -11% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 250 | $87,400 +23% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 230 | $66,160 -7% |
| Sacramento-Roseville-Folsom, CA | 200 | $79,530 +12% |
| Urban Honolulu, HI | 170 | $84,530 +19% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 150 | $55,370 -22% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 70 | $117,080 +65% |
| Boise City, ID | 90 | $104,250 +47% |
| Anchorage, AK | 60 | $94,210 +33% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 51. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.