Answer the question!

What kind of jobs can you get with a human osteology/museology degree?

First I must specify that, while I am indeed specializing in them, I will not have a degree on human osteology, or even really on museology, per se. My degree is on archaeology and that‘s what my diploma will sa-- no wait, no it won‘t. Will it? The bugger if I know, at least it will say B.A. of humanities and M.A. of philosophy. I assume archaeology is mentioned in there somewhere.

But I digress… It’s kind of difficult to list all the possible job opportunities. Partially because you never know where you might end up with the help of your degree and your specialties. The likeliest option is that I will end up at a low-paying job completely unrelated to my education, or I will end up a jobless bum living off of social security, barely avoiding going homeless. But, let’s pretend for a second those are not my likeliest options.

I will start with museology as it’s somewhat easier. Wikipedia defines museology as “the diachronic study of museums and how they have established and developed in their role as an educational mechanism under social and political pressures”. I like to define it as “study of museum things”. We learn basics of conservation, learn to critically analyze exhibitions, practical things, laws/regulations, things that wikipedia mentioned, and so on. With training in museology, I can score a job at, surprise, surprise, a museum, or some other job that utilizes same expertise. Simple enough, eh? Although, researcher is always an option here, much like with every academic field out there.

Human osteology is a slightly more difficult things to explain. Or maybe it isn’t, we’ll see. I study human osteology in an archaeological context. It could be said that I should use either the term physical anthropology or biological anthropology, but the terminology is different depending on where you live, so I don’t usually bother with those - especially when they tend to be more connected to evolution than my research has so far been. With this training, I can mainly score academic jobs: Researcher, lecturer etc. If I were to specialize in the forensic aspect of it, then I could well work at a coroner’s office, if we are talking US here. In my country, medical examiners usually hog the legal cases all to themselves - which makes sense. In fact, I can’t even specialize in human osteology all that well in my country. You can only imagine how crappy my job prospects in this particular field look like. I could rant about things related to this a lot. But I won't.

As an archaeologist in general, I might be able to get a position at the Finnish National Board of Antiquities (a government institute responsible for museums etc, has a field work department for archaeology and does a lot of excavations annually) (I have actually worked for them already), as an archaeological excavator or an expert of sorts for FNBA or a private company, or as a researcher and a lecturer at a university. Those are the main ones that come to mind, you never know though. A job at a nice big museum could be quite nice, I’m crossing my fingers for that one. I like the indoors.

If you could have made any great archaeological discovery, what would it have been?

Let’s see, let’s see…which discovery would have brought me the most money? Yeah, I’d like to make money. I’m boring like that. Tomb of Tutankhamen was certainly a gold mine back in the day, I gather, I bet you could make a fortune with just the book deals you could squeeze out of that one. Plus the regulations on documentation and the laws on what you could keep were far more shoddy back then than they are today - I could have totally snatched some valuable brooch for my private collection and it would have been all fine and dandy. Although, the whole lung fungus thing would cramp my style. I’d likely be as stupid as the rest of the excavators and not know better than to enter a tomb that’s gone undisturbed for thousands of years, without letting it breathe first. Then I would die and my book deal money and my little brooches would all go to the five kids I had because it’s 1920’s and I’m a woman and my fictional husband wanted to bonk me or something.

...I realize I've failed to mention that I also find Tutankhamen's tomb to be a fairly interesting site. Or it would be if you were getting to it before everyone and their grandmother has written about it.