Archaeologist
Also known as: Archeologist, Cultural Resource Manager, Field Archaeologist, CRM Archaeologist
Excavate and analyze material remains — artifacts, structures, and landscapes — to reconstruct and interpret human history and prehistory. Work spans outdoor field excavations, laboratory artifact analysis, and technical report writing, predominantly in cultural resource management (CRM) firms or government agencies.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for archaeologists.
About 1 in 33 reaches this level
Roughly 10,200 anthropologists and archaeologists in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 19-3091, 2025); the top tier includes PI/Directors at large CRM firms and GS-14 federal archaeologists at NPS, BLM, USFS, and Army Corps, perhaps 300-400 slots nationally, about 3% of the field. GS-14 Step 10 pays $163,514 even in the lowest-cost locality and $165K+ in high-cost ones like DC and SF (OPM 2026), under the 2026 GS cap of $197,200.
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a master's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
A two-year science master's typically adds about $41,000 in borrowing on top of a bachelor's, but the spread by field is about two and a half to one: chemistry graduates borrow a median of $25,000, geosciences $31,000, general biology $35,500, genetics $41,000, bioinformatics $47,000, and ecology, evolution and marine biology $62,600 - the most expensive of the lot. Read that spread as indicative rather than measured: the figures come from the federal Scorecard and several rest on a handful of programmes, one for genetics and two for chemistry. Unlike a PhD, an assistantship that waives tuition is something you might win, not something to count on; plan to pay unless a specific programme puts funding in writing before you accept.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page. Where no body publishes a tuition average we show what graduates borrow instead, and say so — that figure leaves out anyone who did not borrow, so it is not the same measure as a tuition price.
AI Risk Assessment
Archaeologists find, dig up and interpret what past people left behind. In the US much of the paid work is compliance: BLS says demand for archaeologists comes from making sure builders, museums and others follow federal rules on protecting historic sites and artifacts. AI helps with the desk end of the job. In a 2023 study in Scientific Reports, researchers trained an AI model on satellite images of the Mesopotamian floodplain to spot possible ancient sites. It found them with about 80% accuracy, and the authors pitched it as a tool "to support the archaeologists in the remote sensing operations (rather than replace them)," since the experts' judgment was crucial to making it work. A 2025 Microsoft Research study of how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with ranked anthropologists and archaeologists 251st of 785 jobs.
The fieldwork, handling artifacts, reading layers of soil and signing off on compliance reports is physical and legal work that AI cannot do. BLS projects jobs for anthropologists and archaeologists to grow 6% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all jobs, from about 10,200 jobs, with about 800 openings a year.
That is the rubric's "2 Low": AI speeds up searching and paperwork, and the core work stays human. The bigger problem for a new graduate is not AI but the size of the field: about 800 openings a year nationwide, and BLS says you typically need at least a master's degree, with some jobs requiring a PhD.
What would change this score. If AI tools for surveying and report writing let firms do compliance work with noticeably fewer archaeologists, this goes to 3.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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