EXPOSED
The paper layer of this job — lecture notes, syllabi, reading summaries, literature reviews, first-pass grading of undergraduate essays, artifact catalog descriptions — is already within reach of current models, and online intro sections are the most exposed part of the load. What holds is live seminar teaching, field school supervision at excavation sites, hands-on lab instruction in osteology and lithics, and thesis mentorship where a named human vouches for a student. The bigger near-term threat is not AI but shrinking humanities enrollment and adjunctification; the modal worker here is increasingly contingent, not tenured.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An intro-to-cultural-anthropology lecture, its slide deck, its reading guide, and its multiple-choice midterm are all reproducible by a model today, but running a five-week field school where you decide which trench to open, teaching a student to distinguish a retouched flake from a natural break with the object in their hand, and directing a dissertation through IRB and committee revisions are not — that split is why this sits at 11 rather than down at 6.
Some physical or field component. Field seasons put you in trenches with a trowel, total station, and screens in heat and rain, and lab sections mean handling human skeletal remains, ceramics, and lithics with students at the bench — but a large share of the teaching year is still classroom and office work, and many in this SOC line no longer run active excavations at all, which keeps this at 12 instead of the 16+ of a full-time field director.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no licensure board for anthropology instruction; the PhD is a hiring credential, not a legal one, and when a permit or NAGPRA compliance issue arises the liability sits with the institution, the state historic preservation office, or the permit-holding PI — the 3 reflects only that ARPA and NAGPRA obligations attach to named individuals on excavation permits.
The human relationship is the product. Thesis and dissertation advising is the product here: a student's committee letter, field school reference, and the network you place them into are non-transferable, and long-term relationships with tribal representatives, descendant communities, and site landowners are held by a person, not a department — 14 rather than higher because the enrollment-driving intro courses are anonymous and interchangeable.
Meaningful discretion. You decide whether an undergraduate's field data are clean enough to publish, whether to halt a dig on encountering human remains and initiate consultation, and whether a candidate is ready to defend — real calls with consequences, but bounded by curriculum committees, permit conditions, and IRB review, which is why this reads 11 and not 15.
Has AI actually changed your work?