Question: what do you get out of becoming an archaeologist?

Jennifer Bates answered on 4 Nov 2016:

Being an archaeologist is my DREAM job.

I always wanted a job that both made me think and also let me do something practical. Archaeology lets me do both. It’s a big challenge: the evidence is never complete, everything is patchy, so you have to look hard at it to work out what it means and the story behind it. And to get that evidence you have to dig, so I get to go out in the field.

Archaeology lets me combine sciences and humanities. It’s using scientific techniques like the study of plant remains, chemical residue analysis or using radiocarbon dating to find out the time period of a site to think about social questions: what were people wearing? what did they eat? what did they think about each other?

Plus I get to travel a lot – I work all over the world. I currently work mainly in India, but have also worked on material from Turkey, Malta and Italy as well as material from lots of sites across the UK. It means you get to spend time in parts of the world that most tourists don’t get to see working on fascinating sites with awesome people.

And it’s the best feeling in the world when you uncover something that no-one has seen for thousands of years and realise that someone all those centuries ago held that artefact just as you are holding it now. It’s as close to time-travel as we’ve gotten yet.