Archaeology is one of the sexiest jobs that nobody understands. Most of us get that it involves the ruins of ancient civilizations, treasure, and the odd fistfight with a huge bald German mechanic, but we're less clear on how any actual science gets done. It's time to change that. My name is Hadas Levine, and I'm the woman who has to pick up Indy's slack while he sword-fights and flirts with teenagers.

6 Digging Is Just the Vacation; the Real Work Sucks

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Say the word "archaeology" and one image pops into your mind: Indiana Jones and Gimli, digging up the Ark of the Covenant in the sands of the Holy Land. Well, I'm an archaeologist in a different chunk of the Holy Land, and I can honestly say, it does look a little like that. For a month or two, which is all the digging season usually lasts.

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None of us look this good digging, and no one besides Harrison Ford looks this good doing anything.

It's very rare to have an excavation go year-round. In a few weeks alone, you'll find hundreds or thousands of items that need to be photographed, cleaned, and cataloged. And that's what we do the rest of the year: You spend a month or two digging and then 10 months daring carpal tunnel syndrome to nut up already and fight you.

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When I went out on my first dig, I expected to see large walls and paved streets covered in vines and angry natives -- you know, the way ruins are depicted in books and movies. It's always something clearly identifiable as an ancient city or temple or orgy cave (depending on your taste in fiction). But then you arrive at an excavation and it's all in tiny bits and pieces, and you realize that most archaeology is making educated guesses about what used to be there based on the scant wreckage you've found. It's like putting together an enormous puzzle after your dog chewed the box with the picture to shreds and somebody stole half the pieces.

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For every intact Ark of the Covenant, there are a million scattered Shards of the Something-or-Other.

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Oh, and remember that awesome sonar drill thing from Jurassic Park? They shoot it into the ground and find out where the dinosaurs are buried, right before Dr. Grant trots off to traumatize more children:

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"I'm starting to think our boss might be a dick."

Stuff like that totally exists, but plenty of working archaeologists go their whole career without ever using it. Dr. Grant was a rock star paleontologist, with a fancy book deal and everything (because that totally exists, and it's not like a Kardashian's biography tops the best-seller lists every week). Most of us aren't rock stars. My university hasn't seen the need to shell out fat stacks of cheddar for maps that look like this:

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Those wavy lines = dinosaur tracks, apparently.

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We're a little more low-tech. It's pretty common to have a bunch of students stand out in a line near where you expect there might be ruins and just start walking and looking for stuff really hard. We'll comb the whole area for pottery shards or ancient penis graffiti, using such complicated equipment as our eyes, our feet, and pointing. Sadly, there are far fewer sonic shotguns involved in archaeology than you have been led to believe.