Seventy-five mentoring engagements. That is a rough estimate of the number of individuals I have connected with as a mentor since 2020. Such interactions, whether on Zoom or in conference hallways, via cold email or warm introductions, have revealed the deep underlying apprehensions of students, early-career professionals, and younger colleagues entering CRM archaeology—as well as a growing number of mid-career job pivoters looking for an exit from tenured roles. What connects them is not a singular question or concern but instead a single navigational problem: the pathways from education and training to sustained careers are real, but they are not visible to all, and many of the road signs that should point toward career success are missing.
More than a decade ago, the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) SAA Archaeological Record dedicated a special issue to the topic of mentoring. The September 2014 edition examined the methods, challenges, and potential of mentoring across workplaces and research settings (Safi Reference Safi2014a, Reference Safi2014b). Articles noted a reliance on traditional academic models that were rooted in the hierarchies of university departments and laboratories. Contributors called for the creation of novel, collaborative frameworks focused on experiential and skill-building opportunities to meet the demands of new forms of archaeological labor (Burchell and Cook Reference Burchell and Cook2014; Dye and Hawley Reference Dye and Hawley2014; Ryan Reference Ryan2014; Safi Reference Safi2014a; Trampier Reference Trampier2014). The message was clear: mentoring, when done thoughtfully, fills a gap in the training and professionalization of emerging archaeologists. More importantly, the articles rang an alarm about career readiness and the need to prepare job seekers not just for their first job but also for sustained careers.
A decade later, that alarm echoes. The employment landscape continues to shift away from the academy, with the majority of those completing degrees in archaeology and anthropology finding work outside higher education. Archaeologists work in cultural resources management (CRM), municipal agencies, historical sites, museums and other nonprofits, independent schools, and nongovernmental and international organizations (Aitchison and Dore Reference Aitchison and Dore2022; Altschul and Klein Reference Altschul and Klein2022; Airlie House Revisited Workforce Training Working Group 2025; Doelle and Altschul Reference Doelle and Altschul2009; Speakman et al. Reference Speakman, Hadden, Colvin, Justin Cramb, Jones and Jones2018). These are largely team-based, client- or stakeholder-focused workplaces that require applied, technical, and interpersonal skills different from those gained through classroom, lab, or field settings. It is within these spaces that mentoring becomes a kind of career infrastructure, a necessary part of the professional development ecosystem that transmits the practical and professional knowledge and creates longevity in the field.
As a mid-career archaeologist now working within a national CRM firm and with a history of entrepreneurship and independent consulting, I am conscious of these shifts in the career landscape experienced throughout my own journey and those of my colleagues. The more instructive vantage point, however, comes from my work in service to several national professional associations over the last half-decade. It is within these contexts that I have connected with more than 75 individuals seeking a mentor. These encounters include both formal mentoring programs, some of which I describe later, and more informal outreaches, as a contact for those who find me through word of mouth or a cold email. Significantly, these conversations have extended beyond archaeology to cultural anthropology, museum studies, nonprofit administration, science communications, economics, biotech, artificial intelligence, and astrophysics. I typically host mentoring conversations one to two times per month, each lasting 30 to 60 minutes, in a professional ritual I think of as “office hours.”
In other words, I have seen considerable career confusion, panic, and struggle since 2020. What I observe through these conversations is a lack not of talent or ambition but of resources: these mentees have no map, no guide, and no community to call on when the road becomes uncertain. They lack a “career infrastructure,” a term I use to describe the framework of formal and informal professional support that an individual archaeologist can access through education centers, workplaces, or personal connections. Such support may include continuing education, professional certifications, and career readiness training.
Mentoring is among these supports and one that I suggest creates especially positive career benefits because it fosters professional networks and social connection. In this article, I argue that more mentoring investment is needed at the frontlines of careers, and I outline ideas and tools that others can adapt. Familiar mentoring models, like those that the SAA Archaeological Record described in 2014, remain a solid foundation. But the pace and scale of change within our economy require innovation in how we prepare for careers. I offer case studies on one-on-one mentoring and introduce concepts of sponsorship and network weaving to shift traditional supports toward increasing career complexity. I close with a comparative evaluation of the three modes and present recommendations for building mentoring capacity in CRM environments.
Recent Trends in Archaeological Training, Employment, and Work
As archaeologists find themselves in roles beyond the classroom, field, or lab, mentoring is a tool that can provide vital information, feedback, and professional connection. Although it is valuable across the full labor stack, including the progression to senior management, mid-career pivots, and transitions to emeritus roles, the emphasis here is on early stages of the professional journey. Because of this flexibility, I maintain a generous definition: mentoring is a professional development resource in which someone with significant work experience or expertise guides, provides tools, opens networks, and acts as a sounding board for an individual seeking greater levels of experience or expertise. That guidance, shared within the context of a professional relationship or formal workplace program, can facilitate understanding and skills that support career growth, stability, and opportunity.
A successful mentoring dynamic depends on both mentor willingness and active mentee engagement (Safi Reference Safi2014a). It benefits from clearly defined expectations around meeting cadence, communication preferences, topical boundaries, confidentiality, and goals. Although mentoring relationships in archaeology do develop organically and can function as a default feature of fieldwork or experiential learning (Burchell and Cook Reference Burchell and Cook2014; Crowley Reference Crowley2025a, Reference Crowley2025b; Ryan Reference Ryan2014; Safi Reference Safi2014a), formalized programs through employers or professional associations can produce more consistent and equitable outcomes for mentees (Kram Reference Kram1985; Ragins and Cotton Reference Ragins and Cotton1999).
Understanding mentoring’s potential role in shaping careers requires a clear picture of where archaeologists are trained. In its 2024 departmental survey, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) identified 488 institutions of higher learning that award degrees in anthropology, the major typically pursued by US-based archaeologists at the undergraduate and graduate levels (American Academy of Arts and Sciences [AAAS] 2025). Departments employed an average of fewer than 11 full- or part-time faculty members, totaling fewer than 5,000 instructors across surveyed institutions. Although enrollments exceeded 272,000 in anthropology courses, departments graduated an average of just 16 undergraduate anthropology degrees per year in 2022–2023 (AAAS 2025:2–3). The impact of recently publicized departmental closures, program suspensions, and other interruptions has yet to be fully measured (Kohli Reference Kohli2025; Quinn Reference Quinn2024), but the headlines signal the fragile state of many of the training centers that produce archaeologists.
The AAAS survey also examined the practices that advanced faculty and student professional outcomes. More than 70% of the responding departments offered career support in the form of occupationally oriented lectures, coursework, events, or internships at the undergraduate level (AAAS 2025:4–5). Yet, of departments that offered doctoral degrees, only 57% provided career-focused lectures and coursework, and only 61% facilitated internships (AAAS 2025:5). Notably absent from the survey was any inquiry about or measurement of relationship-building with external resources, such as university career services units, departmental alumni networks, or corporate partners, nor was there any specific mention of mentoring as an element of career preparation. That absence matters.
Outside anthropology and archaeology, organizational scholarship on mentoring indicates that occupationally oriented programming, including lectures, job fairs, and coursework, is no substitute for sustained mentoring, which produces qualitatively different outcomes in successful career navigation, positive professional identity, and long-term employee retention (Higgins and Kram Reference Higgins and Kram2001; Kram Reference Kram1985).
I see the modest cohort sizes and the underresourced career preparation offerings in the AAAS survey not as footnotes but as evidence of increasing fragility in the career networks that sustain archaeology as a professional field. Federal Reserve Bank of New York data on labor outcomes underscore this point. Those with undergraduate anthropology degrees have the highest unemployment rate at 9.4% among college graduates during their first five years in the workforce, according to the most recent analysis of 2023 labor market outcomes (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2025; Sherman Reference Sherman2025). These statistics are surely imperfect. Few positions carry the job title “anthropologist,” which means the data undercount actual employment. Nor is a category for “archaeologist” tracked in these data. The impact on prospective college students and their families is real, however. Annual media coverage of these employment metrics is primed to discourage new students, who are already weighing the return on their college investment, from entering cultural and social science fields, including archaeology.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projections add to the concern. The projected growth rate for archaeologists and anthropologists was revised downward in August 2025 from 6% to 4% for the period between 2024 and 2034 (Department of Anthropology, UNC Charlotte 2022; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025). These figures do not capture the most recent disruptions cascading through the field, including impacts from AI systems, federal funding cuts, and faculty exits. But the downward adjustment to the growth rate signals that the field is under pressure (Aitchison and Dore Reference Aitchison and Dore2022; Crowley Reference Crowley2024). Mentoring is one of the tools the field can deploy now, without waiting for these data to catch up.
Mentoring Approaches
Robust mentoring programs in archaeology do exist. The Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) has operated mentoring programs through its Gender and Minority Affairs Committee in the past, announcing plans to refresh its one-on-one pairings focused on academic success, career transitions, publishing, and networking as recently as 2024 (Society for Historical Archaeology [SHA] 2024). The Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology in partnership with SHA has sustained a mentorship program for nine consecutive years, connecting underwater archaeologists through cohort-based learning at SHA annual meetings. The SAA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Archaeology (COSWA) has championed mentoring through forums and speed-mentoring sessions addressing career pathways, gender equity, research funding, and work–life balance (Society for American Archaeology 2025).
Regional and institutional programs are also active and include the Southeastern Archaeology Mentoring Conference Network (2025), University of California, Los Angeles’s (2025) Archaeology Mentorship Program at the Costen Institute, Brown University’s Department Undergraduate Group at the Joukowsky Institute (Brown University 2025), the Art & Archaeology Undergraduate Mentorship Program at Princeton University (2022), and the multi-subfield mentorship program through the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Denver (2025). State-level associations in Washington, Texas, and Arizona have developed frameworks emphasizing clear expectations, codes of conduct, and community building (Arizona Archaeological Council 2025; Association for Washington Archaeology 2025; Texas Archaeological Society 2025).
Existing programs share several common features: intake processes for mentors and mentees, thoughtful matching protocols, opportunities for in-person or virtual connection, and community-building elements that sustain relationships beyond individual pairings. Successful programs define what mentoring is not: supervision, evaluation, or hierarchy. They establish boundaries around communication, mutual respect, and confidentiality, creating environments of trust.
The individuals whom I meet through formal programs and informal channels are looking for more than a job posting. They are looking for someone to help them read the landscape. The three case studies that follow highlight how direct mentoring, sponsorship, and network weaving can provide those career navigation skills in different ways, at different scales, and at different levels of investment by the mentor or the organization.
A Twist on the Traditional: Paired, Direct Mentoring
In summer 2022, I was invited to participate as a mentor in the inaugural class of the Ina Rosenthal-Urey Mentorship program through the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Sponsored by cultural anthropologist Elizabeth K. Briody and her husband Marc Robinson, this program awarded four upper-level undergraduates a semester-long mentoring engagement with two professionals—one from academia and one from practice. The goal was to explore career pathways and educational options after graduation. The objective was to engage more intentionally with professional networks and use mentors as a sounding board for planning next steps.
I was matched with a senior from a large anthropology department at a university in central Texas. Will (not his real name) was intent on pursuing a PhD but also had multiple interests in media, languages, and interdisciplinary research. My background in CRM archaeology, geoarchaeology, and science communications made for an interesting pairing. At the same time, Will was working with a tenured professor at a small mid-Atlantic university whose specialty in the archaeology of Eastern Europe complemented his interests in the history and culture of Russia. Will’s simultaneous work with two mentors illustrates what organizational scholars have called a developmental network, a set of relationships that provide more differentiated career support to a mentee than any single mentor can offer alone (Higgins and Kram Reference Higgins and Kram2001).
A brief, written agreement established the ground rules, and a small honorarium for the mentors created a more formal commitment. Over the semester, Will met virtually with each mentor at least three times, set career-oriented goals, and wrote a one-page summary for AAA program managers. Our conversations focused on CRM, particularly entry-level roles, mid-career trajectories, compensation, benefits, and the possibility of doing research outside client work. I tried to address these enormous questions in manageable pieces—walking through job postings, drafting elevator pitches, crafting LinkedIn headlines, dissecting Will’s CV and resume, and generating action items for that first job search.
As an experience in direct mentoring, I welcomed the boundaries and expectations set by the AAA team. A simple written agreement, a defined timeline, and a concrete set of goals helped manage time, focus resources, and sustain the commitment. Will was not ultimately won over to CRM archaeology, but the occasional email with tales of further academic progress confirms that the relationship had lasting impact. I sense that the structure made the positive outcome possible. Research on mentoring programs confirms what this experience illustrates. Structured programs, written agreements, defined goals, and accountability mechanisms can generate positive outcomes for the mentee while giving access to participants who might not otherwise have found their way into informal networks (Ragins and Cotton Reference Ragins and Cotton1999).
Sponsorship: Advocacy in Action
Direct mentoring offers significant benefits, but sponsorship is a more involved mode of fostering individual career success. Popularized by economist and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Reference Hewlett2013), sponsorship is active, whereas traditional mentoring is advisory. A sponsor guides and intervenes. In sponsorship mode, a mid-career or senior archaeologist proactively works with a more junior colleague to make introductions, advocate for projects or promotions, collaborate on deliverables or research outputs, and act as an on-call resource for career guidance. The distinction between a mentor and a sponsor matters. Research on gender and career advancement indicates that women in particular tend to be over-mentored and under-sponsored, receiving guidance but not the advocacy that moves the mentee toward actual advancement opportunities (Ibarra et al. Reference Ibarra, Carter and Silva2010). Formal sponsorship remains an underdeveloped practice within CRM archaeology, with implications for equity outcomes for women and professionals of color.
In my mentoring work since 2020, I have stepped in as a sponsor for three individuals, all early-career colleagues who identify as women. Each was at an inflection point: one was completing an undergraduate degree, one was seeking a first promotion, and one was pivoting from a university role into industry. Sensitive to the realities of this kind of mentoring relationship, I established an assurance of confidentiality with each (hence the limited details here). The goals, meeting cadence, and outcomes varied by individual, although each sponsorship has lasted more than a year.
My role across these engagements has been to ask difficult questions, push back on traditional narratives, make introductions, and advocate at the conference table. I share books, articles, and media, sometimes texted directly to a phone or shipped to a front door. I listen carefully. And I stay ready when the emotional weight of the journey becomes too much to carry alone.
There is one rule that I insist on across all three relationships: this work cannot be invisible. The gain must be realized in whatever form is most productive, even when fear and hesitation are present. For the women I sponsor, those gains have taken the form of media mentions, a blog piece, a research paper, and conference presentations. Making the work visible makes it tangible, producing small wins that accumulate and that encourage future gains. In CRM settings, where succession planning may be informal and opaque, that visibility is not just personally meaningful: it is professionally strategic and creates a solid example of good business practice.
Sponsorship is not for every mentor, and it is not a low-key commitment. It requires significant investments of time, trust, and professional and social capital from the sponsor and readiness from the sponsored individual. The women I have sponsored have become close colleagues as a result, and they have gone on to positively influence others in new professional circles. This is the kind of mentoring relationships that graduate students often imagine and that some CRM practitioners with their networks and professional standing may be well positioned to offer.
Network Weaving: Mentoring at Scale
Direct mentoring and sponsorship produce significant outcomes for individuals, but the reach of those efforts is narrow by design. A mentor working one on one might be able to meaningfully engage three to five people at a time. As just outlined, sponsorship is even more focused. Network weaving solves the scale problem that neither of the other two modes can address on their own.
Network weaving is the purposeful cultivation of connections across specialties, sectors, and career stages. Whereas traditional mentoring and sponsorships are focused on individual relationships, network weaving creates interconnected professional ecosystems or communities of practice that cross institutional boundaries. The sociological foundation for this approach was established in research from the 1970s on strong and weak ties within social networks. Weak ties between loosely connected individuals have been shown to work as bridges between otherwise disconnected nodes of opportunity (Granovetter Reference Granovetter1973). Individuals who occupy those bridging positions—such as the friend of a friend—can introduce people who would not otherwise meet, producing potential career benefits for those they connect (Burt Reference Burt2004). Weak ties, as opposed to the strong ties of family and close friends, have the capacity to grow into strong personal networks because they connect individuals to different social clusters. For students and job seekers who invest in weaving broad professional networks, those connections mean access to learning opportunities, safety nets during job transitions, and visibility within a broader professional community.
As a type of mentoring encounter, network weaving works well as a planned conference event or workshop designed for warm introductions that may lead to further connections. The goal is to create a ripple effect, shifting from a mindset of scarce resources and hesitant interactions toward a crowd-sourced platform for connection and engagement.
The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) Careers Expo at the AAA annual conference is a case in point. Now more than 20 years old, the Careers Expo is not a job fair. It is a network-weaving event for anthropologists across the subfields. Hosted by the Organizational Relations Committee within NAPA, the Expo brings together 30 to 50 career guides—professionals in applied, practicing, and academic roles—for in-depth conversations with attendees exploring career options. Expo navigators greet attendees at the door and, through a gentle intercept interview, learn about each person’s subfield and interests before walking them over to a guide with a warm introduction. Those initial conversations may be brief, or they may extend into informational interviews, job leads, or introduction to a second or third career guide with relevant experience, weaving the network further with each exchange.
I have participated as a career guide since 2021, working with the Organizational Relations team to design and deliver the Expo, and stepping up as NAPA Section president in 2024 to enlist broader resources for the event. I have noticed that, over time, students have arrived better prepared (with their elevator pitch ready and LinkedIn profile active) and that mid-career attendees are staying in conversation longer, navigating questions that were not on any graduate school syllabus. More significantly, I have seen a marked increase in tenure-track and tenured faculty approaching career guides for guidance on how to leave the academy. In short, the Careers Expo is meeting people where the field of anthropology actually is.
Inspired by this work, I created “Diggin’ Up Your Future,” a CRM-focused network-weaving day through my state archaeological society. The program brings together students, local and regional CRM firms, independent practitioners, Tribal members, museum specialists, and academics for a day of learning and networking. In 2024 and again in 2025, the Massachusetts Archaeological Society hosted nearly 60 participants for workshops, conversations, and résumé reviews—all geared toward creating connections and building opportunities. The Expo and Diggin’ Up Your Future models are both replicable, as is the Michigan Technological University Virtual Career Fair for Cultural Resources Management, Heritage, and Preservation professionals, which began in 2025. University departments with extensive alumni lists, museums, nonprofit education centers, and professional associations at the regional level could all serve as hosts for network-weaving events of this kind.
Network weaving shifts this work of mentoring from a single individual to a group of experts participating within a well-defined structure and timeline. Its scale is both an advantage and a limitation. The connections created through network-weaving events are starting points, not sustained relationships. A student who attends a career event but has no follow-up infrastructure to interpret what they heard or to act on the connections made realizes only a fraction of the potential gain from the event. Network weaving can stand alone as an excellent experience but works best when it connects directly to at least one of the other two modes.
Principles for Practice: A Comparative Assessment and Recommendations for CRM
Direct mentoring, sponsorship, and network weaving are not interchangeable, but their differences are design features, not bugs. Knowing what each type of mentoring can and cannot produce is part of one’s professional judgment as a mentor and a prerequisite for constructing sustainable mentoring programs within professional CRM settings.
Direct mentoring opportunities offer significant developmental return. Carefully structured relationships, like the Rosenthal-Urey Mentorship program, allow for sustained feedback, trust building, and individualized guidance that address the needs of a single mentee. These relationships provide both career functions (introductions, technical feedback) and psychological support (often in the form of role modeling or coaching). The limitation is scale, because mentors are not often able to meaningfully support more than a handful of mentees, particularly when each member of the mentorship pair is working under the constraints of billable project schedules.
Sponsorship may deliver the strongest career advancement outcomes of the three modes discussed. This is especially true for women and underrepresented young professionals, who are given active access and not just passive guidance. A sponsor who advocates at the conference table or makes a strategic introduction is translating mentoring conversations into career action in a way that advisory relationships alone cannot. Again, the scale of the engagement is limited. It requires the mentor to leverage social and professional capital for the benefit of the mentee while managing reputational risk if the mentee does not perform as hoped. Of the three, however, sponsorship has the potential to amplify careers and correct structural inequities if constructed thoughtfully.
Network weaving addresses the scale problem in a way that direct mentoring and sponsorship do not. A single well-designed networking event can produce a myriad of meaningful connections in a matter of hours, propagating mentoring knowledge across multiple social nodes. Individuals lacking connections can create bridging ties between professional networks, thereby accessing information, opportunity, and community. Network-weaving events are also an accessible entry point for CRM archaeologists to participate as a mentor: a time-limited investment can produce a measurable positive impact. As bounded engagements, these connections are meant to be starting points, not finish lines.
The three modes are most powerful when seen as complementary layers. Network weaving creates connective tissue across a professional community. Direct mentoring provides consistent guidance for individuals to navigate that professional community. And sponsorship takes those navigation skills and turns them into advancement. These modes are united by that professional community of archaeological mentors invested in cultivating the next generation of talent. Distributing that investment and the work of mentoring across seniority levels, gender, and firm size are the organizational challenges that require additional innovation.
CRM leadership teams can take steps to begin building the kind of career infrastructure that mentoring offers, calibrated to the availability of resources and time investment. Best practices include the following:
Low-Investment Practices (30 Minutes or Less)
• Consider adding a 10-minute, structured career Q&A to project close-outs. Ask open-ended questions like “What did you learn that you would do differently? What would you want to know before the next project?” These quick interactions have a low impact on project budgets but transmit professional knowledge that is not often captured elsewhere in the process of project completion.
• Make introductions a professional habit within your workplace or in your networks. Before attending a professional event, identify one early-career colleague and plan a specific introduction to someone you know. A direct, warm introduction with context can be more valuable than an hour of networking.
Medium-Investment Practices (1–2 hours per Month)
• Hold structured office hours for mentorship. Spending one hour per month, with the time posted on a shared calendar and no agenda required, normalizes career conversations and removes the awkwardness that prevents early-career staff from initiating them. This practice makes career development through mentoring a legitimate use of time.
• Host quarterly team or cohort lunches. A 20-minute career talk from a rotating senior presenter, followed by structured discussion, shares useful professional knowledge that is seldom written down. Topics might be how to negotiate a raise, what it actually takes to move from field tech to project archaeologist, and how to manage client relationships on difficult projects.
Higher-Investment Practices (Ongoing Commitment)
• Build a formalized mentoring pairs program. Construct it outside the immediate supervisory org chart, draw up a one-page written agreement for the mentor and mentee to sign, host a two-hour mentor orientation, and add a mid-year check-in. A formal pairs program makes mentoring visible and accountable.
• Look for sponsorship opportunities to support staff advancement. Identify three career inflection points in your firm (such as technician to project archaeologist, project archaeologist to PI, and PI to senior leadership) and cultivate resources from senior staff to help smooth those transitions.
On the Work of Mentoring
Any honest evaluation of mentoring programs in CRM needs to address a documented inequity, and that is the disproportionate mentoring burden carried by women and practitioners from underrepresented groups. They are more likely to be approached to be mentors and less likely to be recognized or compensated for it, creating an impact on their billable time or professional capital (Ibarra et al. Reference Ibarra, Carter and Silva2010). The recommendations presented here are designed to address this inequity structurally rather than individually, and it is up to each mentor to practice self-care and awareness for their own time and capacity. Ideally, formal programs should distribute mentoring work across a broader group of participants, building in guardrails that prevent mentors from becoming overwhelmed. Designated charge codes or defined promotion and bonus criteria can make mentoring more visible and rewarded. Structured office hours also create a buffer that reduces direct personal requests. And visible participation by all principals or owners signals that mentoring is a professional best practice.
Final Thoughts
Career readiness is a continuing need within archaeology. Mentoring, as one element of that preparation, represents an indispensable professional infrastructure in archaeology—as essential as academic credentialing or technical expertise. It enables knowledge transfer, develops hard and soft skills, increases access to opportunity, and establishes an understanding of ethical practice across every career stage. By fostering collaborative relationships, mentoring enhances not only individual careers but strengthens the entire discipline. Sponsorship and network weaving extend direct mentoring’s impact, accelerating advancement and building resilient professional communities.
The urgency is clear. Higher education institutions face unprecedented challenges. Students are questioning the return on educational investment as labor statistics for our field head in the wrong directions. Early-career professionals are left to navigate precarious job markets with insufficient guidance. Against this backdrop, mentoring programs become lifelines, creating connections that help them weather institutional instability, develop adaptive capacity, and sustain meaningful careers despite economic turbulence.
Expanding the pipeline for talent in archaeology depends on our collective willingness to build and maintain this infrastructure. Mentoring cannot remain the province of a few individuals who volunteer time at the margins of overscheduled lives. It must become embedded in both academic and organizational cultures, recognized as essential work, and resourced sufficiently. Only then will archaeology retain skilled practitioners, diversify leadership, and ensure that the next generation thrives.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Amherst Cultural Resources team at SWCA Environmental Consultants, especially Chris Donta for his advocacy of mentoring and encouragement to publish this article. Similarly, I want to thank my own mentors Cathleen Crain, Niel Tashima, and Elizabeth K. Briody for their support, ideas, and feedback. My thanks go out to the Governing Council of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, the Anthropology Career Readiness Network, the senior staff of the American Anthropological Association, and the Trustees of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society. Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to Mark, Caroline, and Evelyn Crowley for their support of my “office hours” and the time spent in researching and writing this article. In accordance with the CUP guideline on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, summaries generated by AI Overviews in Google Search were reviewed as part of keyword searches on topics and organizations related to the content of this article. Sentence structures were improved in limited cases and citations were proofed. The Spanish-language abstract was generated using Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Funding Statement
This research received no specific grant funding from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Data Availability Statement
No original data were used.
Competing Interests
The author declares none.
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