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.
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.
Some relationship component. Most deliverables are read by a SHPO reviewer or a federal agency archeologist who cares about the findings, not who wrote them, but standing tribal consultation relationships, THPO rapport, and repeat CRM clients who request a specific principal investigator by name give the role more relational value than anonymous technical output — a 7, not a 3.
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.
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