Graduates with a master’s degree in Applied Archaeology may be employed by a variety of public and private employers.
For example, Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic region will need more trained professionals to assist in the growth of the fields of historic preservation and heritage tourism, the most rapidly expanding segment of the tourism industry, Pennsylvania’s second largest industry. The governor, the state legislature, and in particular the General Assembly’s Center for Rural Pennsylvania have long recognized the need to combine research on cultural and historical preservation with tourism.
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate have, in the past, unanimously passed resolutions recognizing the importance of the state’s historic and prehistoric features. A recent House resolution calls for a statewide inventory of historically significant structures. Tourism has been recognized by the state as an important, in some cases key, economic force, and many state agencies have stated that Pennsylvania should use historic preservation to its economic advantage, improving the state’s economy while also promoting a sense of regional and state pride.
For example, Governor Rendell recently launched a cabinet-level task force on the Pennsylvania Wilds to encourage “heritage tourism,” combining officials from the Department of Natural Resources, the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, and other agencies.
The Master of Arts in Applied Archaeology is a program designed to meet industry and government needs for professional archaeologists.
Most of these graduates will be employed in the fields of cultural resource management, historic preservation, public archaeology, and heritage planning and tourism. All of these, especially Cultural Resource Management, are multidisciplinary fields in which applied professional archaeologists work with historians, geographers, architectural historians, engineers, planners, and environmental specialists. Graduates of the program will work for engineering and environmental firms and conduct archaeological investigations on PennDOT, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Allegheny National Forest, and National Park Service construction projects.
By law, they will be involved in local borough or township projects such as wastewater treatment, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-regulated Natural Gas pipeline construction, and cell tower constructions, to name a few. Several recent studies by the Society for American Archaeology have found that there is a continuing and increasing need for archaeologists with applied M.A. degrees, and there are very few programs in the United States that offer such training.
