Summary
If I had 1€ for each time someone told me not to complain because I was fortunate to work on my passion, now I could maybe pay a Golden Open Access in a Q1 journal. Precarity defines archaeology today for most professionals. We suffer many problems like unstable work, both in academia (for ECRs at least) and contract; very limited funding that hardly manages to cover basic costs of research; increasing requirements that make people overwork until they burn out or settle (in a context where privilege has a lot to do with the final outcome); just to name a couple of scenarios.We could be comforted in the fact that the whole world is lately like this. But “the sorrow of many is a fool’s consolation” (as we say in Spain). All this situation draws from the neoliberal drift of contemporary Western societies (and, therefore, the world). Archaeology is embedded in the global economy, and this results in a situation we are not fighting at all. If any, once we settle, we reproduce the system as if thinking: “it was hard for me, not gonna make it any better for those behind”.We know what is failing, over the last forty years critical archaeologies have called for action, since the political turn of the 80s to the latest movements on gender, disability or colonialism. Still, the discipline keeps going towards a less reflexive practice as part of some sort of machine that needs to keep running for the benefit of… who?In academic archaeology, the supremacy of techno-science (encouraged by funding and evaluation processes) is hindering work on more reflexive or social lines of research. Precarity lasts longer, with low salaries, untenable mobility and more pressure than ever. In commercial archaeology, the temporality and precarity of work are not new, but the alienation in the process keeps raising in a panorama where actual archaeology is less important every day. Reporting on record is not archaeology.And while some would say: “that’s not my reality” I believe this is the reality in most of Europe and most of the world, and we need to call for a halt and reconsider the way archaeology is taking. We do control most of the process, just are not even considering to change it. Why?
Keywords
Archaeology. Precariety. Profession.