Finding Archaeology Job Listings

Postdoctoral Positions:

Postdocs can be an excellent option for your first position out of graduate school (PhD track), as they provide an opportunity to turn your dissertation into a book while also getting some practice teaching. As mentioned below, academic wiki sites are good places to find listings of postdocs on the market: http://academicjobs.wikia.com (see especially the section for Humanities and Social Sciences Postdocs) http://classics.wikidot.com/ (you must enroll/join)

Many postdocs also appear on the Chronicle, H-Net, jobs.ac.uk, THES jobs, etc., and there are blogs, such as this one by Erik van Rossenberg, dedicated to post-graduate archaeological positions.

Additionally, there are a number of postdoc opportunities open to candidates essentially every year. Many of these (particularly the Society of Fellows positions) are open to people from the full range of humanistic disciplines or social science disciplines, so they are very competitive. In such cases, there is also no guarantee that the search committee will actually know anything about your field of study, since the judges may come from fields far removed from your own. So if you don’t get one of these, don’t take it personally – but it is still worth trying! Other positions, such as the ISAW Visiting Research Scholars or the Chicago Oriental Institute postdoc, are more geared towards ancient studies in one or another form.

Some postdocs that hold rounds of application every, or almost every, year are as follows:

ISAW Visiting Research Scholars (http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/vrs-program.htm). Specifically designed for people who study the ancient world, ISAW appoints quite a few people (7 on average) as VRS scholars every year. So your chances of getting a position are generally much higher than for something like a Society of Fellows postdoc. Application opens about a year prior. Cornell Society for the Humanities (https://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/fellowships): applicants must demonstrate relevance of their proposal to an annual theme, for example the 2013/14 theme of “Occupation.” Chicago Oriental Institute (http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/). The person holding this postdoc has to organize a conference and edit the proceedings. This position is designed for Near Eastern studies, but Classical archaeologists whose research deals with the Eastern fringes of the Classical world may still be eligible. Chicago Society of Fellows (http://societyoffellows.uchicago.edu/) Columbia Society of Fellows in the Humanities: (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/societyoffellows/fellowship.html) Harvard Society of Fellows (https://socfell.fas.harvard.edu/). Technically, you need to be nominated for this position, so you will need to ask your advisor to nominate you. Michigan Society of Fellows (http://societyoffellows.umich.edu/) Princeton Society of Fellows (http://www.princeton.edu/sf/) Stanford Mellon Fellowships (https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-humanities-center/fellowships) Penn Humanities Forum (https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/): like the Cornell fellowship, the theme changes every year; recent themes have included “Adaptations,” “Peripheral Visions,” and “Violent Means.” American Academy of Arts and Sciences (https://www.amacad.org/topic/arts-humanities)

Also, numerous other schools offer Mellon postdocs occasionally, but not every year. In general, you should be able to find all such positions on the Chronicle website, H-Net, and the Academic Jobs Wiki’s section on Humanities and Social Sciences Postdocs.

There are numerous postdocs available outside the US as well. Most can be found via the Academicjobs wiki listed above and below. In particular, a number are advertised each year by the various colleges at Cambridge and Oxford. Competition is of course intense, but someone has to win them. For example for Cambridge see the ones listed for last year at: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2010-11/weekly/6197/section15.shtml. These Oxbridge postdocs can be found by following the Oxford Gazette (http://www.ox.ac.uk/gazette/) and Cambridge Reporter (http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/).

Jobs (Faculty especially) but also postdocs and similar:

The SCS (formerly APA) Placement Service
https://placement.apaclassics.org/
Classics-related job listings every month. Although the job listings are available free of charge on their website, job candidates really do need to subscribe to the placement service as well (the service currently costs $20). Subscribers get emails about job postings slightly before the information is made available on the SCS website – but the real benefit of subscription to the placement service is access to interviews at the yearly AIA/SCS conference. Only people who have signed up with the placement service are allowed to use the SCS’s interview rooms, and since many jobs conduct their first-round interviews at the AIA/SCS conference, this essentially means that you are required to sign up with the placement service in order to be interviewed for these jobs.

Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/section/Jobs/61/
An indispensable resource for anyone going on the job market in any academic field.

H-Net Job Guide
https://www.h-net.org/jobs/home.php
A database of job and postdoc listings in all humanistic fields.

Academic Keys for the Humanities
http://humanities.academickeys.com/
Fairly similar to H-Net.

The Classics Wiki
http://classics.wikidot.com/
(password: sicfatur)
Classics and related. As you will soon discover, the Classics Wiki is alternately incredibly useful and incredibly frustrating. It provides a place where Classics job seekers can post anonymous information about the responses they’ve gotten from various positions. That is, if you have applied for a job at a university, and you want to know why you haven’t heard back from them yet, you can check the wiki: has anyone else announced that they got an interview request from that university? If so, then you can probably cross that university off your list; but if not, then perhaps they just haven’t made up their shortlist yet. (Or, of course, perhaps none of the people on their shortlist happen to use the Classics Wiki.)
As you can imagine, this system is quite open to abuse, and there have been cases where people have used the cover of anonymity to post false information on the wiki (although the majority of users seem to be reasonably honest). The wiki does have a tendency to become a mill of unsubstantiated rumors. So it’s often best to treat any information on this website with a grain of salt.
However: the wiki is extremely useful as a source of information about what jobs are currently on the market! As soon as wiki users apply for a job at a university, they create a listing for that job on the site. So if you go to the wiki and see what jobs other people have listed, you can then check to see if any of those jobs might be relevant to you as well.

Academic Jobs Wiki
http://academicjobs.wikia.com
Essentially the same thing as the Classics Wiki, but broader in scope. All the caveats about the Classics Wiki apply here too, of course. But once again, the wiki does provide a useful list of jobs currently on the market, and one occasionally finds things here that somehow never made it on to the SCS (formerly APA) list, the Chronicle, or any of the other usual sources.
This wiki’s “Humanities and Social Sciences Postdocs” section is particularly useful, since it is one of the only places that aims to gather together all of the postdoc listings currently on the market. Other sections of the wiki that might conceivably feature jobs relevant to Archaeologists may include, depending on one’s research specialties, the following subheadings: History; Archaeology Jobs; Art History; Anthropology; Near Eastern Studies, Religious Studies; Biblical Studies; etc.

Jobs.ac.uk
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/
A source for postdocs and jobs, including academic jobs, in the UK and beyond. Many British and European universities post job listings here.

Society for American Archaeology
https://careers.saa.org/jobseekers/
Archaeology. Most of the postings are specific to New World and/or salvage archaeology.

Times Higher Education
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/unijobs/
All academic jobs especially in the UK but also more widely; faculty and postdoc opportunities are advertised

Occasional Articles
Marston, J.M. Navigating the Interdisciplinary Academic Job Market in Archaeology. The SAA Archaeological Record, January 2014: 18-21.

University Websites
It can also be worthwhile to go directly to individual universities’ websites and see if they have an internal database of job listings. Sometimes schools have job openings but do not promote them as widely as they should.

Listservs

Finally, yet another useful source of job announcements can be listservs, such as the following:

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