Anthropology professors
Official title Anthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary (SOC 25-1061)
Also called Archaeology professor, Archeology postsec teacher, Anthropology faculty, Archaeology faculty, Cultural anthropology professor
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 5,240 US anthropology professors, with median pay of $99,650 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 5,260, in May 2024, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 50 from 1902, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for anthropology professors: LiDAR remote sensing, 2010 to 2022.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 2.6% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 40.8% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). Anthropology professors: jobs and pay since 1902 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1061
Future History. "Anthropology professors: jobs and pay since 1902." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1061.
@misc{futurehistory_25_1061, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Anthropology professors: jobs and pay since 1902}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/25-1061}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
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≈ $97,095 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
John Wesley Powell founds the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1879, creating the first permanent paid positions for professional anthropologists in the United States. Powell assigns ethnologists to systematically document the languages, cultures, and oral traditions of Native American peoples of the American West. The Bureau's work, and the museum employment model it represented, was the institutional predecessor of the university anthropology faculty role.
Columbia University establishes the first independent Department of Anthropology in the United States, with Franz Boas as its founding chair. In the same year, the American Anthropological Association is founded with 175 initial members. Boas uses his Columbia position to train virtually every major American anthropologist of the next generation: Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and others, who then found or staff departments across the country. The Boasian program at Columbia is the origin point of the modern US anthropology faculty role as a distinct career identity.
The Servicemen's Readjustment Act (GI Bill) is signed in June 1944. Nearly 8 million veterans use its educational provisions by 1956, more than doubling the number of university degree holders between 1940 and 1950. College enrollment surges force universities to hire faculty rapidly throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. For anthropology, the expansion is transformative: departments that had 3-6 faculty in 1945 grow to 15-25 by 1970. Anthropology's introductory courses become standard liberal arts requirements at most public universities. Students who earn PhDs in anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s "obtain academic positions before the ink on their diplomas was dry," as documented in the Expanding American Anthropology 1945-1980.
The academic job market in anthropology contracts sharply in the early-to-mid 1970s as the postwar enrollment boom ends and university budgets tighten under stagflation. Tenure-track faculty positions as a share of total anthropology faculty fall from approximately 55.8% in 1975, beginning a decades-long structural decline that will reach 29.2% by 2011 (Fussell et al. 2018). The surplus of newly minted PhDs relative to available tenure-track positions becomes chronic. The generation trained in the 1960s expansion is still in place; the generation graduating after 1973 faces a fundamentally different labor market. Cultural resource management archaeology begins to emerge as an alternative career path as the National Historic Preservation Act (1966) and its Section 106 consultation requirements generate demand for applied archaeologists outside the academy.
The 2007-2009 financial crisis produces the sharpest single contraction in academic hiring in the discipline's modern history. Fussell et al. (2018) documents the before-and-after: 591 anthropology doctoral graduates from the 2004-2009 cohort obtained tenure-track faculty positions, compared to only 304 from the 2010-2014 cohort, a 49% decline in placements despite roughly stable PhD production. The crisis permanently resets baseline hiring rates downward: by 2014, only approximately 21% of US anthropology PhDs obtained tenure-track positions. The 2008 age discrimination exemption removal for mandatory retirement compounded the issue by keeping experienced faculty in positions longer.
The Society for American Archaeology holds its first dedicated AI in Archaeology symposium at its annual meeting in Denver (2025). The American Anthropological Association's AI Task Force publishes "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Anthropological Research." Both organizations simultaneously document AI tools reducing data-processing burdens by 40-60% in documentation-intensive research workflows and flag new ethical responsibilities around AI applied to Indigenous cultural materials, human skeletal remains, and community-sourced oral histories. The discipline reaches a bifurcation: faculty who adopt AI field-methods tools and qualitative coding assistants become measurably more productive and better positioned in a competitive job market; those who do not adapt face growing pressure from AI-augmented peers.
Will AI replace anthropology professors? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for anthropology professors
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you herePrepare course materials (syllabi, reading lists, homework assignments, and handouts) using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to generate first-draft syllabi and reading list suggestions for standard topics (Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, World Prehistory, Archaeological Theory), then revising with disciplinary expertise to include current excavation reports and ethnographic publications AI training data does not cover, and ensuring field safety protocols and IRB ethics requirements are accurately reflected.
Prepare course materials (syllabi, reading lists, homework assignments, and handouts) using ChatGPT Edu or Claude to generate first-draft syllabi and reading list suggestions for standard topics (Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, World Prehistory, Archaeological Theory), then revising with disciplinary expertise to include current excavation reports and ethnographic publications AI training data does not cover, and ensuring field safety protocols and IRB ethics requirements are accurately reflected.[1],[2]
AI tools can generate a structurally adequate syllabus for standard anthropology courses in minutes, including weekly topic sequencing, reading categories, and assignment types. The currency gap is the critical editorial challenge: AI training data is sparse on recent excavations (sites reported in American Antiquity 2023-2025 may be absent), ongoing ethnographic fieldwork results, and subdiscipline debates that have shifted in the last few years. Use AI syllabus drafts as a structural scaffold and invest your preparation time in the reading list selection, ensuring the assigned scholarship reflects the current state of each debate rather than AI's necessarily dated snapshot of disciplinary knowledge. Also check AI-generated syllabi carefully for IRB and field safety protocol accuracy, where errors can have real compliance consequences.
AI is sitting alongside you hereGrade and provide feedback on student work (research papers, artifact analysis reports, ethnographic field journals, site report write-ups) using Gradescope's AI-assisted grouping for structured short-answer assessments (artifact identification questions, site chronology multiple-choice), and Turnitin AI detection to flag likely AI-generated prose in research papers, while providing expert evaluative feedback on the analytical depth of interpretive arguments that only a disciplinary expert can assess.
Grade and provide feedback on student work (research papers, artifact analysis reports, ethnographic field journals, site report write-ups) using Gradescope's AI-assisted grouping for structured short-answer assessments (artifact identification questions, site chronology multiple-choice), and Turnitin AI detection to flag likely AI-generated prose in research papers, while providing expert evaluative feedback on the analytical depth of interpretive arguments that only a disciplinary expert can assess.[7],[1]
Gradescope handles high-volume structured grading (artifact identification quizzes, map questions, site chronology fill-ins) efficiently and is deployed at 3,000+ institutions including those with strong anthropology programs. Turnitin AI detection flags essays where AI-generated prose is probable. The expert grading effort that AI cannot replace: evaluating whether a student's interpretation of an artifact assemblage is contextually sound, whether a student's ethnographic description demonstrates genuine observational depth, and whether a theoretical argument about cultural change applies the relevant framework correctly. Anthropology grading is particularly demanding because the discipline values holistic, contextual interpretation: the kind of evaluation that requires exactly the expert judgment AI currently cannot supply for novel field contexts. Use AI tools to clear the mechanical grading backlog; invest your grading time in the extended written feedback that actually develops anthropological thinking.
AI is sitting alongside you hereConduct and synthesize literature reviews for research proposals and publications (using Elicit to triage 138M+ academic papers, NotebookLM to build structured Q&A over uploaded journal article corpora, and Consensus to categorize findings by directional agreement) then applying disciplinary expertise to identify which AI-synthesized claims reflect genuine scholarly consensus versus contested interpretations in ongoing archaeological or anthropological debates.
Conduct and synthesize literature reviews for research proposals and publications (using Elicit to triage 138M+ academic papers, NotebookLM to build structured Q&A over uploaded journal article corpora, and Consensus to categorize findings by directional agreement) then applying disciplinary expertise to identify which AI-synthesized claims reflect genuine scholarly consensus versus contested interpretations in ongoing archaeological or anthropological debates.[8],[1]
AI literature synthesis tools deliver genuine time savings for anthropology and archaeology researchers who produce literature-intensive publications and grant applications. Elicit can triage and extract from hundreds of papers in minutes; NotebookLM turns a corpus of uploaded PDFs into a queryable document; Consensus identifies directional agreement across studies. The critical expert step: evaluating whether AI-synthesized conclusions from the archaeological or ethnographic literature reflect actual scholarly consensus or are artifacts of citation patterns, subdisciplines with smaller literatures (e.g., bioarchaeology of a specific geographic region) may have many key papers total, and AI tools calibrated on larger disciplines will overweight widely-cited but older studies relative to recent fieldwork reports that have revised the picture. Always run AI literature synthesis against your own expert knowledge of the current state of the specific subfield debate.
Where anthropology professors go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Education Administrators, Postsecondary
- US median pay
- $104,590 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +1.8%
- Anthropologists and Archeologists
- US median pay
- $70,770 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +6%
- Curators
- US median pay
- $63,420 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +4.9%
What each move takes
Education Administrators, Postsecondary
Anthropology and archaeology faculty frequently move into department chair, director of undergraduate studies, or associate dean roles, particularly those who have served on curriculum committees, led field school programs that required logistical and compliance coordination, managed NIH/NSF/NEH grant portfolios, or developed institutional partnerships with museums and heritage agencies. Anthropology departments are under pressure from enrollment trends, interdisciplinary restructuring pressures, and the need to articulate the value of field-based education in an AI-disrupted humanities environment; faculty with both disciplinary authority and administrative experience are valued for leadership roles. The CRI increase reflects that education administration is moderately augmented for data analytics tasks while the strategic judgment and faculty-relations core is durable.
- · Higher education budget management: faculty line planning, field school financial modeling (equipment, travel, insurance, student fees), and research overhead cost recovery from sponsored projects
- · Accreditation and curriculum review: HLC and regional accreditor standards for interdisciplinary programs; assessment frameworks for field-based learning outcomes that satisfy both humanities and social science accreditation criteria
- · Faculty personnel processes: promotion-and-tenure committee leadership for a mixed-methods field where both qualitative ethnographic research and quantitative archaeological science outputs count; academic hiring in a constrained job market
- · AI governance for humanities and social science departments: developing IRB and institutional policy on AI processing of fieldwork data, archived cultural materials, and student research; faculty professional development planning for AI methods integration
How has the work of anthropology professors changed since 1879?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Field notebook, hand-drawn stratigraphy, glass-plate photography
The foundational toolkit of the anthropology and archaeology field practitioner was purely manual: field notebooks for recording observations, hand-drawn stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches, and glass-plate photography for site and ethnographic documentation from the 1880s onward. Lewis Henry Morgan's systematic kinship charts (1871) and Franz Boas's physical measurement calipers and anthropometric data tables were the quantitative infrastructure of the era. Teaching these methods meant transmitting embodied craft knowledge through apprenticeship: working alongside a senior researcher in the field or museum laboratory until the student developed independent observational judgment. No mechanical device mediated the core intellectual work.
Mimeograph course materials, punch-card statistical computing, radiocarbon dating (1949)
Willard Libby's radiocarbon dating method, published in 1949 and receiving the Nobel Prize in 1960, transformed the chronological infrastructure of archaeology teaching by giving faculty and students access to absolute dates for the first time. What had been relative chronologies based on stratigraphy and typology could now be anchored in calendar years. For anthropology teachers, the arrival of punch-card statistical computing in the late 1950s and early 1960s enabled quantitative analysis of large ethnographic and archaeological datasets that had previously required weeks of manual tabulation. Mimeograph machines and later photocopiers transformed the preparation and distribution of course materials, separating the intellectual work of syllabus creation from the physical labor of reproduction.
Desktop computers, SPSS and SAS statistical software, photocopy course packs
Desktop computers arrived in anthropology and archaeology departments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) becoming the dominant tool for quantitative analysis of survey data, skeletal measurements, and artifact assemblage statistics. Word processors replaced typewriters for writing, enabling easier manuscript revision and syllabus updating. Photocopy course packs replaced mimeograph materials and allowed instructors to build semester-length reading collections from journal articles and book chapters. The introduction of scanning electron microscopy into university labs enabled artifact surface analysis that opened new research questions in lithic and ceramic studies. These tools accelerated research output but did not fundamentally change the structure of teaching: lecture, seminar, lab, and fieldwork remained the core pedagogical forms.
GIS (ArcGIS), the World Wide Web, ATLAS.ti and NVivo qualitative analysis software
Geographic Information Systems entered archaeology curricula in the early 1990s: the search results note that "the 1990s will probably be remembered in the history of archaeology as the age of GIS." ArcGIS enabled spatial analysis of site distributions, survey data, and cultural landscape patterns that had previously required manual drafting. The World Wide Web (from 1993) transformed access to scholarly literature, archaeological databases, and digital museum collections. ATLAS.ti (1993) and NVivo (1999) introduced computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, allowing ethnographic field notes and interview transcripts to be coded and analyzed systematically rather than exclusively by hand. For anthropology faculty, these tools widened the research questions addressable within a standard faculty workload without fieldwork travel costs and began shifting the teaching of methods from craft apprenticeship toward documented, software-mediated workflows.
Effect on the workGIS and qualitative data analysis software reduced the time required for the data-organization phases of research without replacing the interpretive judgment that constitutes the scholarly contribution. The effect was productivity gain within existing employment levels, not displacement of faculty positions.
LiDAR remote sensing, drone photogrammetry, Agisoft Metashape structure-from-motion
Airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) became accessible to archaeology faculty through federally funded data repositories (OpenTopography, launched 2009) and through NSF-supported field projects in the 2010s, enabling detection of ancient settlement patterns and earthworks hidden under dense vegetation. The rediscovery of the Maya metropolis of Caracol in Belize via LiDAR in 2010 was widely covered and brought the technology to mainstream disciplinary attention. Drone photogrammetry, accelerated by the commercial drone market after 2013, and Agisoft Metashape structure-from-motion software made high-resolution 3-D site documentation possible within a field day rather than a field season. These tools entered undergraduate field school curricula at major programs in the early 2010s and are now standard at Arizona State, UC Santa Barbara, and other large field-methods programs. The effect on teaching was transformative for the methods curriculum: assignments that had previously required expensive instrument rental or physical field access could now be completed using publicly available LiDAR datasets and student-accessible drone hardware.
Effect on the workLiDAR and photogrammetry AI reduced site-documentation time for standard excavation workflows (documented by the SAA in 2025), freeing field school time for interpretation and mentorship rather than surveying and drawing. This productivity gain benefited faculty whose research was documentation-intensive.
Generative AI (large language models, AI qualitative coding, AI literature synthesis)
Large language models entered the anthropology and archaeology teaching workflow in 2022-2023 through three channels: (1) AI qualitative coding tools (ATLAS.ti Intentional AI Coding, MAXQDA AI Assist) that reduced first-pass ethnographic transcript coding from weeks to days; (2) AI literature synthesis tools (Elicit, NotebookLM) that compressed systematic literature review time; and (3) general-purpose LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude) used for lecture outline drafting, syllabus scaffolding, and reading list generation. The Federal Reserve FEDS Notes (Timmerman and Xiao, February 2026) identified social sciences among the highest LLM-exposed academic disciplines, and the AAA AI Task Force (2025) acknowledged the dual disruption: AI is transforming the very research methods these faculty teach (ethnographic coding, archaeological prospection, ancient DNA analysis) while simultaneously exposing the text-heavy teaching tasks (lecture preparation, grading, course material drafting) to AI augmentation. Faculty who integrate these tools effectively recover substantial preparation and data-processing time; those who do not face increasing competitive pressure from better-equipped peers and from students whose AI-generated coursework is increasingly difficult to assess.
Effect on the workAI tools have not yet caused measurable displacement in anthropology and archaeology faculty employment. The SAA (2025) and AAA (2025) both frame the current moment as one of augmentation opportunity rather than displacement threat, with the durable core of embodied fieldwork, ethics judgment on culturally sensitive materials, and graduate student mentorship identified as AI-resistant.
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Browse all rolesAnthropology and Archeology Teachers, Postsecondary employment and pay by year
View all 29 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1902 | 50 | n/a | Est., American Anthropological Association Researched context | Report |
| 1945 | 300 | n/a | Est., University of New Mexico Researched context | Report |
| 1963 | n/a | $9,470 | Est., AAUP 1962-63 faculty salary survey via… Researched context | Report |
| 1970 | 3,500 | n/a | Est., Expanding American Anthropology Researched context | Report |
| 1985 | 4,200 | n/a | Est., Fussell et al. (2018) Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 4,400 | $56,540 | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 4,690 | $59,710 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 4,990 | $60,860 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 5,320 | $60,710 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 5,040 | $62,820 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 5,290 | $64,530 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 5,500 | $67,750 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 5,880 | $69,520 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 5,850 | $73,600 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 5,790 | $75,460 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 5,690 | $76,020 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 5,920 | $75,930 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 6,100 | $74,750 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 6,000 | $77,650 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 5,700 | $81,350 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 5,770 | $81,580 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 5,890 | $83,940 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 5,850 | $86,220 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 5,590 | $89,220 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 5,010 | $97,340 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 4,930 | $85,000 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 5,030 | $93,650 | BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 5,260 | $95,770 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 5,240 | $99,650 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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