Latest Data: 2020
This page examines the economic backgrounds of UK professional archaeologists.
Highlights
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In 2020, for the first time, Profiling the Profession surveyed individuals working in archaeology rather than solely surveying their employers. This offered the opportunity to ask questions about archaeologists’ socio-economic backgrounds. The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) was used to measure this, which is based on employment i.e. jobs held. This is an economic background indicator that is used as a proxy for social background. It is not a measure of ‘class’, nor what people perceive their background as being.
Archaeologists were asked “what job(s) did your parent(s) or guardians have when you were 14”. To make it comparable to ONS NS-SEC figures only the highest job was used to categorise the socio-economic backgrounds of archaeologists. NS-SEC is based on households, with the highest job category held by anyone in a household being used to determine the classification of the entire household.
Table 2.10.1 includes UK-wide NS-SEC figures for households that include someone aged 14 and under. This likely represents a close, but not perfect, current distribution of economic conditions for households in the UK that have children. Since the data for archaeologists is based on when they were in a household at the age of 14, this UK data source can be used as a rough comparison. This indicates that while there is a concentration of archaeologists from higher economic ‘classes’ and less in the unemployed and other category (includes students, retired grandparents looking after grandchildren, etc), the socio-economic backgrounds of those working in archaeology patterns similarly to the rest of the UK, excluding this shift from the lowest to the highest paying occupations.
Caution: This comparison is for present UK distributions of households. Archaeologists are responding to this with information that applied when they were 14 (and the average age of respondents is 44), when the UK distribution would have been different, and in many cases unknowable as NS-SEC was not used until the 2001 Census. There is a limit to what can be inferred from these results. Furthermore, some feedback received on the survey was that not enough guidance was given on what jobs fell into each category. There was some confusion about what constituted semi-routine and routine occupations which may explain the low response rates for semi-routine. In future surveys we hope to improve this question.
Table 2.10.1: Responses from employed/self-employed archaeologists to “what job(s) did your parent(s) or guardians have when you were 14?” for 2019-20 and UK wide NE-SEC distribution (ONS).
| Archaeologists Count | Archaeologists % | Households 2017-18 with person 14 and under | NE-SEC % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Higher professional and managerial occupations | 304 | 30% | 2,202,247 | 19% |
| 2. Lower managerial and professional occupations | 319 | 32% | 2,822,231 | 25% |
| 3. Intermediate occupations | 75 | 8% | 995,397 | 9% |
| 4. Small employers and own account workers | 81 | 8% | 1,287,280 | 11% |
| 5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations | 93 | 9% | 874,395 | 8% |
| 6. Semi-routine occupations | 29 | 3% | 1,287,563 | 11% |
| 7. Routine occupations | 86 | 9% | 977,224 | 9% |
| 8. Never worked, unemployed, and not elsewhere classified | 10 | 1% | 1,040,687 | 9% |
| Total (n=) | 997 | 20,969,600 |
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Image Credit
Image from The Calanais Fields Project: Excavation of a Prehistoric Sub-Peat Field System at Calanais, Isle of Lewis, 1999–2000 by Melanie Johnson, Catherine Flitcroft and Lucy Verrillwith contributions by Mhairi Hastie, Anthony Newton, Adrian Tams and Graeme Warren e-ISSN: 2056-7421DOI: https://doi.org/10.9750/issn.2056-7421.2021.94 Published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. CC BY-NC 4.0
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CREDITS
Title: Profiling the Profession
2020 Authors: Kenneth Aitchison, Poppy German and Doug Rocks-Macqueen
Published by: Landward Research Ltd
Version Date: 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9572452-8-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14333387
License: CC BY SA 4.0 for all text and figures. Header images are from different sources check image credits for their specific licensing.
2020 funders: Historic England, with support from Historic Environment Scotland, CIfA and FAME.
Questions about Profiling the Profession: enquiries@landward.eu