First of all, archaeologists do not dig, hunt, or even concern ourselves with dinosaurs. We study the remnants of human culture and believe it or not, dinosaurs existed and went extinct millions of years before humans. Modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens) have only been around for roughly 100,000 years and didn’t even know the dinosaurs existed until relatively recently. Paleontologists (like Ross Gellar from FRIENDS) study dinosaurs, not archaeologists.

We don’t find great treasures (unfortunately). Well, we do, but they’re not treasures in the traditional monetary sense. We find artifacts which are great treasures to the archaeological community because they further our knowledge of a particular culture or specific site. We do not, or at least pretty rarely, find gold, gems, or crystal skulls.

This next one really strikes home for me. We are NOT grave robbers. Those of us who work in the CRM world (cultural resource management) are often contracted to deal with cemeteries which have been long forgotten and rediscovered when someone decides to build some unnecessary capitalistic structure (read walmart). We usually have to remove the bodies, try to learn something about them and hopefully contact descendants, and then reinter the bodies in a safe location set aside for them. I say this hits home for me because it seems that every time I tell someone what project I’m working on (especially my parents) I seem to be doing something with a cemetery. As a result, I’m pretty sure that everyone thinks I’m a glorified grave robber. Yeah, well, forget you all.

Another popular myth is that we spend all of our time in the field digging (or doing geophysical surveys in my case). Well, not even close. Digging is the easy part and is relatively quick. We spend countless days in the lab studying and analyzing what we dug up and writing reports about it. Digging is mostly just mechanical work but processing and analyzing takes a lot of thought and effort

There are many more myths out there but I just don’t care enough to talk about the rest right now so learn from your mistakes and if you ever ask me about what kind of dinosaurs I dig up, I will probably punch you. Seriously…