Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….