ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOBS IN EUROPE Where, which ones, and how (to improve your chances) to get them? Raimund Karl Abstract: Finding jobs in archaeology is anything but easy, but a topic of the utmost interest to everyone who wants to work in it, and particularly to students shortly before completing their degree. Since there is little advice to be found on how to actually get a job in archaeology (other than rather cynical rumours of the rather unpleasant kind), most students and job-seekers in archaeology have few if any ideas of what they can actually do themselves to increase their chances. In this article, I will try to provide some such advice, focussing primarily on the European labour market and, within that, the areas and archaeological sectors I know best, the academic sector in the German and English speaking countries, with the odd other advice thrown in where it seemed suitable. --- One of the most significant questions for any student pursuing an archaeology degree is: how will I ever get a job in archaeology? And to begin with an ugly truth: the archaeology labour market is looking anything but rosy, particularly in times of economic crisis (Schlanger and Aitchison 2010; Karl et al. 2012; Karl and Möller 2013), but even in more buoyant economic times (Aitchison et al. 2014). To provide an example, in January 2012, there were c. 1,150 students enrolled on archaeology degrees in Austria alone, 184 of which were working on their PhD (Karl 2012, fig. 4). Yet, in all of 2012 – a good one for recent years, incidentally – a total of only 22 adverts for archaeology jobs were published in Austria that I became aware of (and I am scanning archaeology job adverts for the internet archaeology job resource on http://archaeologieforum.at which I operate), a mere 74 in the whole German speaking area of Europe, and even in the predominantly English speaking areas of Europe – usually the region with the most such adverts in Europe – just 445 such adverts came to my attention (fig. 1). And much the same is true for the rest of Europe: there are many more students of archaeology than jobs advertised in their respective country in a year, usually a significant multiple thereof. The best guess I can offer is that for every archaeology job publicly advertised in any given year, there will be at least 10 students enrolled in archaeology degrees. Of course, the situation is not actually as dire as these raw figures seem to indicate, which brings me to another ugly truth: many archaeology jobs do not get publicly advertised. To again use Austria as an example, to the best of my knowledge, 226 archaeology jobs were publicly advertised in Austria in the last decade or so. Yet, when one compares the results of the Austrian archaeology labour market studies of 2008 (Karl 2008) and 2013 (Karl and Möller 2014), the number of archaeologists employed in Austria according to staff numbers provided by employers has risen by c. 35% between 2008-2013. In total numbers, this is an increase by c. 250 posts, and since the majority of posts is temporary only, an estimated 500+ archaeology jobs must have been appointed to in Austria in the last decade, excluding minor fieldwork jobs. Thus, it would seem that less than half of the jobs that probably were available were advertised sufficiently widely that they came to my attention. And a third ugly truth is that many appointment processes in archaeology are neither fair, nor open, let alone transparent (for a discussion of this see Härke 2006). Rather, jobs mostly go to those who have long been known to the appointing body, who may indeed have worked for that body before, and who are