It has taken a few months but I have gone through a the AAA e-guide and then personally through the websites of a little shy of 400 departments (anthroplogy/archaeology/other) (see full list here) to do a head count of the academic archaeologists in the US. Places were these numbers might be week- archaeologists in departments that don’t offer archaeology degrees/courses. This group is only listed on some websites, usually under the term archaeologists in other departments/organizations, and it could be under represented. Could, this is not known. Also, classics seems to be a bit underrepresented. Also, adjuncts or temporary staff are sometimes not listed or no details are given to determine if they are archaeologists or not.
On the flip side a pretty generous definition was used- that is a faculty profile mentions archaeology or archaeology-like interests e.g. lots of osteo people are included. Whether or not these people consider themselves archaeologists is not know. This probably equals out some of those missed.
I will be posting more details on each group over the next week but here are the general numbers-
Lectures/visiting profs/adjucts/researchers/post-docs (basically anyone who is not a tenure track academic)- 468
Assistant Professors-260
Associate Professors-344
Professors- 494
Archaeologists in other departments- 70
For a grand total of 1636 archaeologists employed at universities. This count tries to exclude CRM companies affiliated with/owned by universities but does include many of their staff who teach in an adjunct complicity. In all, around 1100 probably have steady employment but this is not know for sure as some positions, like researcher, might be permanent just non-teaching. This means roughly 2/3s of academic archaeologists are in tenure track positions but only about half actually have tenure. Archaeology does not appear to be worse off then some other disciplines that have more then half of their staff in temp. positions. How this relates to the number of PhD’s being produced for these positions is another story and one that will be explored over the next week.
One last note several archaeologists (mainly temporary positions) teach at more then one university but were only counted once.
February 14th, 2012 → 4:00 pm
[...] Yesterday, I posted the number of archaeologists working in academia in the US and today I will look at the subset of Assistant Professors. There are currently roughly 259 [...]
February 15th, 2012 → 5:39 pm
[...] do not work in such a department but are still in academia full description of data can be found here). As would be expected most of them got their degrees several years ago un-like assistant [...]
February 16th, 2012 → 10:31 am
[...] If you want to know more about associate professors see here, assistant professors see here, or methodology used to collect the results see here. [...]
February 17th, 2012 → 10:11 pm
[...] Over all numbers [...]
February 20th, 2012 → 8:53 pm
[...] is probably the most accurate but now about 8 years out of date. Using the information I collected on the number of academic archaeologists in the United States and some general data on average professors salaries I have come up with the [...]
March 15th, 2012 → 3:35 pm
[...] The sad truth is that this is not the case nor will it every be. Using the same data I collected on academics in archaeology I have graphed out by year when the current academic staff obtained their PhDs. Year of PhD for [...]