ABSTRACT
Archaeology as a Profession Archaeology still has an aura of romance and spectacular discovery about it, which probably accounts for why many of you took the course that assigned this book in the first place. You will soon learn that modern-day archaeology, while often fascinating and sometimes conducted in remote lands, is a highly technical discipline in which spectacular discoveries are few and far between. True, exciting finds occasionally hit the headlines, such as the Moche Lords of Sipán or the Uluburun shipwreck, but the fact remains that most
archaeologists labor far from the public eye, often on unspectacular and sometimes downright monotonous sites or obscure problems. An Indiana Jones type of personality is certainly not a qualification for archaeology; indeed, it has never been. Indiana Jones himself is complete fiction, a character built up from a group of well-known pioneer archaeologists of the early twentieth century whose discoveries and adventures were indeed larger than life. Today’s archaeologist is about as far from Professor Jones as you can get and probably works a long way from the halls of academe.
