#artefact studies

Hello! I’m glad you stumbed across me, and of course I can help - sorry I’ve not replied sooner, I’ve just finished my first week of work and have been very tired. It’s very possible to get into museum work if you persevere and volunteer (my course has already got about 50% of its graduates into a job, and we submitted dissertations two weeks ago) and making yourself useful is really the thing you need to do.

How much archaeology have you been doing as part of your degree? Have you been involved with any projects? The trick with archaeology, as I have found, is that you need experience plus a useful skillset which will get you invited back to places (I happily deal with bulk finds, which very few people have the tolerance for; this means I’ll be going out to Italy again next year and possibly Egypt in the spring, too). You cannot just go and dig. But if you’re into artefacts already, great - what’s your interest specifically?

I’m a ceramicist, which means I play with pottery 9-5. I’m currently working with an assemblage of legacy data from Syria - I wrote about the African Red Slip pottery for my master’s and I’m currently studying the Phocean Red Slip, which is from Turkey, 5th-7th century AD (way out of my preferred time period - but it’s pottery and a job and money and therefore you go for it - you can’t be too precious with time periods). At the moment I’m cataloging it all, which means I’m sitting with lots of books and comparing pot sherds to pictures of pots to work out which shape they are. It’s a bit brainbending but I’m getting the catalogue written up first (and drawn, so help me) and then I’ll go and do the research and have a bit of a play. For my dissertation I did a lot of work on the provenance of the pottery - with petrographic study - but for this stuff it’s not as applicable as we think there’s only the one production site for it. Which helps.

Um… with artefact studies courses in particular there are a couple of places in the UK which do them specifically but they require a very sciencey background, which you might not have if you’re a classicist (I didn’t). My course - which was Museum and Artefact Studies - does both and the artefact side involves a lot of scientific stuff you wouldn’t expect. I really got into it but others found it very hard, so YMMV, but it’s very much a secondary thing to the Museums side of it. I swung my course so I did a module of archaeology instead of others - playing with survey data - and my dissertation was obviously artefact based. I made it work for me and I was very pleased I did, it was definitely the right choice for me in terms of an MA.

For museums studies… if you’re not already volunteering at a museum you should start asap because normally courses want people with previous experience. Equally, if there’s local archaeology going on which is relevant to your interests - and even if it isn’t - get involved and start meeting people. Local groups could be working with people who could get you a job; and don’t be too precious about your time period, either. Who you know is vastly important in the heritage sector. Also you need to be willing to do random weird stuff at the drop of a hat, be fazed by very little indeed (27 boxes of pottery got washed in six days and no I don’t know how I managed that one while still smiling) and get used to differing degrees of slumming it for what you love. Oh, and not being a shitty person also helps unbelievably but your message was nice so I’m sure you’ll be fine!