Latest Data: 2020
This page assesses the characteristics of employed and self-employed UK professional archaeologists in 2019-20.
Highlights
Share this Research
With the 2019-20 Profiling the Profession survey including individuals, one of the characteristics that was captured was whether respondents were employed or self-employed. 11% were self-employed in their primary job. This is a little lower than the UK average of 15%. Significantly more are self-employed for secondary jobs but only a small number of archaeologists have secondary jobs. If both secondary and primary jobs are combined this increases the level of self-employment to 12% of all jobs.
Table 2.14.1: Employed and self-employed individual respondents in 2019-20. UK Data from ONS
| Archaeologists – Primary Job | Archaeologists – Secondary Job | UK Workforce | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Count | % | Count – thousands | % | Count – thousands | % | |
| Employee | 850 | 89% | 26 | 55% | 27,846 | 85% |
| Self-employed | 108 | 11% | 21 | 45% | 4,970 | 15% |
Download this table:
Correlations
Warning: As discussed in the methods, ‘statistically significant results’ means nothing more than these results are worthy of further investigation. The low r-values are not ‘proof’.
A significant correlation raised by the analysis, see methods section, is between being self-employed (primary jobs) and age. 80% of self-employed archaeologists are over the age of 40. This follows general UK trends, though younger archaeologists are less likely to be self-employed than the UK workforce in the same age group.
Table 2.14.2: Employed and self-employed individual respondents in 2019-20 and in the UK, by age. UK Data from ONS via Nomis.
| Archaeologists | UK | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| employee | self-employed | employee | self-employed | |||||
| count | % | count | % | count | % | count | % | |
| Under 30 | 100 | 93% | 7 | 7% | 5,903,600 | 93% | 447,300 | 7% |
| 30-39 | 231 | 95% | 13 | 5% | 6,652,900 | 88% | 903,900 | 12% |
| 40-49 | 241 | 94% | 15 | 6% | 6,007,900 | 85% | 1,052,200 | 15% |
| 50-59 | 177 | 86% | 30 | 14% | 5,873,700 | 83% | 1,228,200 | 17% |
Download this table:
Their were correlations with self-employment and job roles but this is not considered important. Those working for National Government Agencies or in Local Planning Authorities are not likely to be self-employed, which is unsurprising as those sorts of organisations rarely contract out roles to self-employed individuals – though self-employed people may have these organisations as clients.
Image Credit
Multi-sensor array geophysics in action. Left: magnetic gradiometry, right: multichannel GPR survey (image courtesy Alexandre Novo and Geostudi Astier). From Opitz, R. and Herrmann, J., 2018. Recent Trends and Long-standing Problems in Archaeological Remote Sensing. Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology, 1(1), pp.19–41. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jcaa.11 CC BY 4.0
Version control and change log
As a digital document we may update parts of this page in the future to account for corrections or the need for clarification. Please use the version when citing:
Version: 1.0
Change log: no changes
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