Sneak Peak at 2011-2012 Jobs in British Archaeology

Posted on May 2, 2012

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Last year I did the newest version of Jobs in British Archaeology, a annual review of archaeology pay in the UK through job postings. The fiscal year ended at the beginning of April so I have spent the last few days doing some mind numbing work of copying, pasting, and crunching numbers from archaeology job postings for the fiscal year from April 2011 to March 2012 . The result of which are a rough guide of what people are getting paid in archaeology for various positions.

I will be posting more information over the next couple of days but here is a quick summary. First though here is a quick methodology-

The data was gathered from both the IfA JIS and BAJR job postings (thank you IfA and David) covering the dates from April 1st 2011 to March 31st 2012. Each job was treated as a single data point and the advertised pay rate counted. If the job posting did not specify the number of jobs being advertise it was counted as a single job.  Where a salary range was given, the middle point was used for analysis (keeping with past publications). Hourly, daily or weekly wages were converted into annual salary equivalents. To understand how each position is defined please see previous issues of Jobs in British Archaeology. Jobs are characterised by job description not title. Because the midpoint is used as the reference for pay it is important to remember that the numbers below are averages of averages.

I will post more over the next couple of days on each position with highs and lows which will give a better idea of what you will probably be paid, just keep in mind these are averages. Pay for the last year and several years before:

Position 2008 2009 2010 2011
Excavator  £       15,299  £     16,032  £  16,744  £ 16,612
Supervisor  £       18,715  £     18,926  £19,016  £ 19,517
Field Officer  £       21,200  £     22,548 £22,160  £ 21,792
Project Manager  £       28,532  £     30,585 £30,262  £ 31,537
Junior CRM/SMR  £       20,354  £     21,370 £20,597  £ 21,123
Senior CRM/SMR  £       32,475  £     35,735  £32,900  £ 40,873
Specialist  £       19,691  £     21,685  £22,459  £ 25,374
Conservitors  £       22,297  £     22,799  £23,861  £ 20,016
Illustrators / Graphics officer  £       18,944  £     21,656  £  19,738  £ 20,283
Consultants  £       28,035  £     31,387 £29,205  £ 29,563

Note- as I post more on each position I will hyper link the titles above so you can click on them for more information. So far- Excavator; Supervisor ; Field Officer; Project Manager; Junior CRM/SMR; Senior CRM/SMR; Specialist; Conservation; Consultant

For the most part pay did not improve much for the vast majority of archaeologist in 2011. The exception being for specialists e.g. your osteoarcheologists, surveyors, radiocarbon tech. etc. which has gone up and senior CRM/SMR archaeologists. The senior CRM/SMR archaeologists was heavily influenced by a very high number of senior positions becoming available from English Heritage and National Trust.  Some of those positions were pushing 80,000+. Its good to be King as the saying goes. For the rest of us it looks like 2011 was not a good year to be looking for a raise, at least by transferring jobs. To end on some good news, the number of posts examined this year was up by about 170 over last years. More people are advertising for positions which means more people are most likely hiring.

Posted in: Archaeology the Profession