R. Joe Brandon

From Wikinfo

R. Joe Brandon (1967- ) is an American archaeologist whose work has included excavations and surveys in North Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, & Ecuador.

Born in 1987, he studied at Northern Illinois University, graduating in 1989. R. Joe continued his education in 1997 at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas where he refined his GIS skills and applied them to archaeological research.

In the late 1990's R. Joe founded Shovelbums at http://www.shovelbums.org . Shovelbums was designed to be the worlds largest free archaeology employment service and long ago passed the 8,000 member mark and continues to grow. Today Shovelbums is where any professional in the fields of archaeology, historic preservation and Cultural Resources Management (CRM) goes to hear about work.

R. Joe's most recent work has been the production of The Big Kahuna List at http://www.shovelbums.org/TBKL_directory/directory.html which centralizes all information regarding the location and contact information for archaeology companies around the world which greatly facilitates archaeologists looking for work.

Shovelbums is now widely recognized by many of us in the field as being the driving force behind standardizing fair levels of pay in CRM.

There is a point between your BA and your Phd in archaeology when we all need to make some money to cover the growing bills. Of course many of us prefer to be able to do this work in our field of choice, archaeology. The problem has always been though finding that work. If you ask yourself �how many archaeologists have I ever met?� and it is likely you will get the same answer most people do�few, if any. Hence, �archaeology jobs� are not something you see in the Sunday want ads; actually, you really do not see them much at all. So finding out about fieldwork in archaeology has always been a bit problematic.

When there were not that many archaeologists or archaeology jobs this was not a major issue. But as Cultural Resource Managementbegan to grow in the 1970�s the opportunities for archaeologist to find gainful work in the field grew in step. In those days, though because only archaeologists knew other archaeologists the time honored �phone tree� became the natural choice for announcing job opportunities in archaeology. The problem is that if you are living in a tent on the Tohatchi flats (http://www.terraserver.com/imagery/image_usgs.asp?cpx=-108.71798660989951&cpy=35.854210996362774&usgs_res=14&view=A&t=pan) north of Gallup, NM and you only get out to the payphone once a week to call friends you could easily miss hearing about a job.

New ways to find excavation jobs.

With the advent of the internet in the 1990�s enterprising archaeologists naturally began to use the web to announce job postings related to our field. The problem still was that when you were out of the field for only a few days and accessing the web via the local library, it was hard to make time to find all of the sites listing archaeology jobs. So in the late 1990�s R. Joe and his buddies in the anthropology graduate program at the [[University of Arkansas] and the center for advanced spatial studies (external link http://cast.uark.edu) where talking about what a challenge it was to find jobs in archaeology.

The beginning of Shovel Bums

R. Joe hit on the idea that a streamlined moderated mailing list dedicated only to archaeology and CRM jobs might be more efficient that web sites alone. He named the list �Shovel Bums�, which is a tongue in cheek reference to one of the names professional field archaeologists call each other, and announced it to his friends on a personal discussion list called the "pocket_gophers" (side note: This pocket_gopher list name came about from an article many of them had just read by physical anthropologist Clark Larsen (http://monkey.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty_pages/larsen.htm) which discussed the effect pocket gophers had on human inhumations in the archaeological context.

There were about 10-12 archaeologists on this pocket_gopher list (the peoples whose name I could find are Jim Strait, Jamie Brandon (no relation to R. Joe), Rachel Black, James Davidson, Jennifer Boudreaux-Lynn, Barb Bundy, Rhoula Khawam, Joe Nigro, Bill Gardner, Ryan Peterson but using the logic from the Faberge commercial �if you tell two friends, and they tell two friends� (http://www.terraserver.com/imagery/image_usgs.asp?cpx=-108.71798660989951&cpy=35.854210996362774&usgs_res=14&view=A&t=pan) the news about Shovel Bums promulgated through the archaeology community. Within weeks the list had hundreds of members, and by 2003 the list had over 8,500 active members. The success of the list was beyond anyone�s expectation. It seems Shovel Bums appeared just when enough archaeologists were beginning to use e-mail that the service became a homegrown niche phenomenon.

Shovel Bums today

Amusingly the name �R. Joe� is now as common in the archaeological vernacular as some of the traditional grand old men like Lewis Binford (external link http://www.smu.edu/anthro/old/Faculty%20html%20and%20images/lbinford.html) and Richard Scotty MacNeish (http://www.utexas.edu/courses/wilson/ant304/biography/arybios97/bairdbio.html). The interesting thing about this is that while the noted luminaries are always referred to colloquially by their last names (Binford, MacNeish, Leakey) people just call him �R. Joe�. He is one of �us�, an archaeologists who gets out and does the work. A true �Shovel Bum�.

Using Shovel Bums R. Joe has done a tremendous job in promoting archaeology as a viable career, and for pushing for higher standards of archaeological ethics and fair pay for employees.

Shovelbums Tomorrow

The largest organization in archaeology is the Society for American Archaeology (http://www.saa.org) with a membership of about 6,500. However Shovel Bums surpassed that number in 2000. Now with a membership of over 8,500 active members shows just what an impact this simple service has had on archaeology. There are numerous lists and web sites about archaeology, but it seems as if Shovel Bums is the one constant as everyone is curious as to who is excavating what, when and where. And compared to the $125+ dues as a SAA member to the price of $0, Shovel Bums fits right into an archaeologists budget :)

Six degrees of R. Joe

Or 'Six Degrees of Shovel Bums' - it all depends on the amount of tequila consumed :-)

Traditionally at the beginning of an archaeological project the crew gets together during the first week and goes out together to get to know each other. Because archaeology is such a small profession archaeologists always casually play the �name game� at these get togethers. This is where we list of projects and schools to see who we all know in common. The field is so small still that usually everyone gets to participate from the grey haired silverback professor to the first time in the field undergraduate.

I have also heard that crews now play a version of this name game based on the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (external link http://www.louisville.com/loumag/mar/bacon.htm) which they call �Six Degrees of Shovel Bums� or �Six Degrees of R. Joe�. In these games archaeologists and CRM�ers use their personal networks of contacts to see how many degrees apart they are or how far they are from a particular archaeologist or how far are they from R. Joe. One variation on the game I saw in Louisiana (http://www.louisiana.gov/wps/portal/ ) was to trace your degrees laterally, i.e. if you are a crew chief, you can only trace your route via other crew chiefs, by university attended, sites, etc� Tequila seemed to facilitate more ludicrous pathways, with a fun twist especially when you are alone with a group of archaeologists in a strange place and need to make your entertainment.