I got into the field of archaeology many years
ago. I was interested in Archaeology and History
as a child, however I really never considered
being an archaeologist until I was in college.
We all want to know about our past and our
history and Archaeology is an extremely important
way of getting at that. If you find material
that comes from a burial and you can in your
mind recreate the ways in which people dealt
with that burial several hundred years ago
and how they might have had a loved one that
they buried in a certain way and they put
certain material in with them, that sort of
thing. So understanding the site in its context
is really important to me and because I work
in Geographic Information Systems I deal with
spatial analysis and spatial things. I’m
interested in the ways people expended energy
over the landscape. So I see things in terms
of how much effort people took to do some
kinds of tasks or behaviours and I create
models that recreate that in the computer.
The Masters of Professional Archaeology course
at the University of Western Australia developed
within the last couple of years. We essentially
wanted to offer a professional degree that
trained students in these kinds of skills
where they’re business related skills and
they’re related to specialities in Archaeology
that have nothing to do with teaching the
field but have a lot to do with Heritage Management.
We put the students in real world scenarios,
they develop real projects, real reports,
real outcomes and these then help them move
on through into their professional development.
I think that I would rather be doing Archaeology
than any other job. I can’t picture having
actually gone into… at times you know I
was a business administration major and I
can’t imagine having actually gone into
that, or electrical engineering and I think
it would have been horribly dull. I had a
lot of fond memories of working in wilderness
places where it’s really hard to get to,
you’re days from the nearest road, you know
you’re basically camping out in the middle
of nowhere and it’s just, you know, really
fun projects to work on, even when you’re
not finding any good archaeological sites.
