 All right, hello, everyone. Welcome to this week's ARF Brown Bag lecture. Got our speaker, David Hyde here for you, waiting in the wings. I am one of the grad student organizers of the Brown Bag series. My name is Jordan Brown. I'm a grad student here and very excited to have one of our own on the program again. I don't have any big announcements for y'all here, but I do want to flag that next week's Brown Bag talk will be another fun one with another alum, Annalisa Morris, who is currently a high school teacher in Oakland, and she will be talking with us about education in archeology and archeology in education. So I'm very excited about that. Before we get going today, I will begin with a land acknowledgement and it's modeled on that developed by the Native American Student Development Office in partnership with the Moac Maloni tribe. This is a working formulation, which will be replaced with language reflecting the particular position of the ARF community and developed in collaboration with the appropriate stakeholders and on that. The archeological research facility sits on the territory of Cochun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Trochanioa Loni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. We hereby acknowledge this land remains of great importance to the Loni people that every member of the ARF community benefits from the continued occupation of this land and that it is our responsibility to support indigenous sovereignty and hold the University of California accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. So for our talk this week, as I mentioned briefly before, we have David Hyde here who completed his PhD in anthropology at Berkeley in 2019, studying emergent community relations and material practices within a pluralistic workforce at a historic era, Line Kilm and Company Village on the Santa Cruz coast. Since 2018, he's been working as a principal investigator and historical archeologist for far Western Anthropological Research Group out of their Sausalito office. Not all too far away. And in this role, he has conducted archeological projects within an environmental compliance framework throughout Northern California, participating in all aspects of that work from project management to field work, historical research, artifact analysis, reporting all that goes with that. So we're looking forward to hearing about all of these things today. And we've got a bevy of current grad students here with us on the Zoom as well. So looking forward to a lively discussion afterwards. So bring your questions. If you're not in the Zoom and you're on the YouTube, feel free to post in the chat and we will convey the questions there as well. So without any further ado, turn it over to David for Cultural Resource Management, the wide and wild world of consulting. All right, thanks very much. I'm just gonna share my screen here. Can you guys see that okay? Yeah, I'll take the lack of response as a yes. Yep, you got it. Awesome, great. Well, first of all, thank you very much. Thanks for the great invitation, or excuse me, introduction and the invitation. I wish I was back in person in the RF, obviously getting to see you all in person. But it's really nice seeing some familiar names and faces in your little tiles flipping over there. So yeah, thank you again for the invitation. So yeah, that was a nice introduction. Hit on some of my background, so I won't go too much into that. As mentioned, I am currently working at Far Western Anthropological Research Group as a principal investigator, bit of a mouthful. So I'm just gonna call it Far Western, some of most people call it. And yeah, I work in the consulting kind of world of CRM. I saw that you had Alexandra a couple of weeks ago, and we gave a talk, so I'm hoping this might be a nice kind of counter or parallel conversation from her sort of perspective from the TIPO world, which is definitely CRM, but very different than the consulting world. So yeah, I also understand it's supposed to be pretty informal. So I'll try to keep my sort of spiel relatively short, 15 minutes or so, so that I can turn it over to the important stuff, which is kind of questions and interests that you guys might have for me. So I will just kind of give you a little bit of a roadmap for where the sort of intro part of this talk will go. I'll give you a little bit of an insight into kind of my journey into CRM. That's not because I like talking about myself. In fact, it's kind of horrifying, but when I talk to people about careers and what I'm doing, I often get a lot of questions about that. How did you get into it? Why are you working there and all that kind of stuff? Then I'm gonna try to give you a little bit of an insight into the daily life, you know, kind of what I do on a day-to-day basis, what I do in my current position. Then I'm gonna talk specifically about the role and opportunity for community engagement within CRM. This was sort of specifically asked. Sounds like there's an interest in knowing what that looks like, what that can be. So I'll talk about that. And then I'm gonna try to kind of distill some of the main ideas to what I think are kind of the good and bads, like any job of CRM. And spoiler alert, it kind of depends on your perspective and who you are, whether it's good or bad. Yeah. And so my kind of goal of this intro part of our talk today is to kind of give you some candid and personal insights into what a job in the CRM consulting world, fresh out of a PhD program kind of looks like with the kind of thought that you might be able to get something from that, think about whether it might be a good career option for you or not, just kind of provide some insights for you. Okay, so yeah, as Jordan was saying, for those of you who I didn't overlap in the program with, I graduated from Berkeley in 2019, so not too long ago. And there's probably some familiar faces for you there. I, like many people entered the program with a career goal of wanting to work in academia, getting that one of those coded tenure track jobs. I had worked in CRM a little bit before coming into the program. I had worked as sort of on-call field and lab techs for some CRM companies. I had interned for the archeology program of Cal Fire. So I kind of worked in the contract compliance world a little bit, but to be honest, CRM was not really on my radar as sort of a career goal coming out of the program. But as I'm sure many of you can relate, a lot of things can change in the six to 10 to 12 years you might be in the program. Your priorities can change, your interests change, importantly, but maybe not talked about that much, it's like your life situations change and all of this can lead to one job option being maybe more appealing than another. So for me, one of the big things was I wanted to stay local. I was born and raised in the Bay Area. My wife's from the area, both of our families are here. Her career is here. So we had to have some tough conversations early, not early on, but when I was sort of finishing up and starting to look at the job landscape and we kind of decided that at least for the short term I'd kind of look locally. And if a tenure track kind of position was available in the general area, definitely go for it. But if it was like University of Arkansas or something, I think against the Razorbacks, but I'd probably pass on that just for personal reasons. And this is one of the reasons why CRM started to look a little bit appealing or at least as a possible job opportunity. As you probably already know, there are tons or dozens of CRM companies in the Bay Area, the greater Bay Area, or environmental compliance companies that have a CRM component. And that it was, the local aspect was somewhat appealing, but it was also an opportunity to continue doing like direct kind of archeology for lack of a better word, working with sites and resources and doing research. And yeah, I mean, I knew that the work would probably be at least centered generally in California, which was a kind of geographic research area. So it was kind of around September of 2018, I was on track to finish up my dissertation in spring of 2019, keeping an eye for the job or keeping an eye on the job market. And I was perusing the Society for California Archeology Job Board. The only reason I give you these details is because if you're not already looking at that and you wanna work, especially locally, I highly encourage you to check out the SCA Job Board. It's where a lot of agency and CRM contract work gets posted. And yeah, there was a job posting through Far Western and it met a lot of the sort of things I was looking for. And I had known a little bit about Far Western ahead time. They had, I knew to me, they had kind of a reputation for doing really good and interesting research within the kind of umbrella of compliance and CRM. So it immediately kind of jumped out at me as an opportunity. And I was, it's kind of amazing. I was talking to Nico before this started. It was really sort of serendipitous. This job posting for Far Western was for their brand new office in Sausalito. So not too far from Berkeley for a sort of upper level historical archeologist to help like basically start to build out their historical archeology program that was gonna be rooted in that office. So it was a really serendipitous kind of opportunity. And so I interviewed and got the job. And yeah, it was great. I started part-time until I finished my dissertation. They were super supportive of me kind of balancing both things and helping me do that. And then I hit the ground line full-time basically the day after I walked at graduation. So just a little bit of background on Far Western just for your own knowledge as a sort of locally available archeology opportunity. They're based in, they're sort of mainly based in Davis which is just south of Sacramento. But like I said, they now have a satellite office in Sausalito which mainly focuses on Bay Area projects but we do do work everywhere and has a sort of strong historical archeology component. Far Western also has an office they call their Great Basin office in Carson City which is near Lake Tahoe. So also a really awesome place to live. And then they have a desert branch office in Henderson which is near Las Vegas. So I don't know, maybe a cool place depending on what you're into. But between those offices we kind of have all California and the Great Basin covered and that's really where the majority of our work takes place. And there's about a hundred full-time employees spread about those offices most of them being in the Davis office. We have about six people in the Sausalito office so it's not a huge, not a huge office. So I got hired as a principal investigator and so if you're not familiar with that means and kind of the compliance world you use a principal investigator and that's kind of a senior archeologist so principal investigator is kind of the position you'd be coming in, coming out of a PhD program. And you're basically gonna be expected to kind of do everything that is involved in managing an archeological project in the CRM world. So everything from developing proposals, managing budgets, doing staffing, delegating different tasks, coordinating with departments. But also occasionally, out in the field directing field crews. Once in a while you get to actually look at an artifact and do some analysis. And then you're doing research and you're spending a lot of your time writing up these compliance reports which is really your main product in CRM that's your deliverable. Unfortunately, I don't have many super exciting photos of me sitting at my desk writing reports. So instead I subbed in a couple cooler photos of some of our work in Marin County. That one on the left is in Southern Marin. You can see Mount Temple Pius back there. I chose these specifically because of the other Berkeley connections. That's Monsei Osterlai. She's a graduate of the undergrad anthropology program at Berkeley. And then that small little head popping out from behind the rock on the photo on the right is Michelle Mabee who some of you might know and remember from her time at Berkeley. Both of them also work out of the Sausage office. So lots of Berkeley connections and hopefully more in the future. All right, so I wanted to talk a little bit about kind of the transition between grad school in academia and CRM. So I mentioned I had some but not a ton of CRM experience. And when I first got the job, I thought, hey, I'm pretty good archeologist. This compliant stuff can't be too complicated. Shouldn't be that hard of a transition. And that actually really wasn't the case. I found there to be a pretty steep learning curve. So I want to touch on some of those things that kind of caught me by surprise. So one is just kind of like basic organizational structure. So like in grad school, you're used to doing everything yourself, right? You for the most part with support from your cohort and advisors obviously. But if you want a GIS component in your dissertation, you're gonna take two semesters worth of classes in the Geoders department and then teach yourself ArcGIS or bug Nico to teach you ArcGIS or something. So in the CRM world, in the professional world of archeology, that's just not the case. We have a whole team of GIS people. We have a geo archeology team. We have like 10 different internal databases that do all sorts of cool stuff. We have a production team. We have something called accounts receivable. Like stuff you would never imagine having to deal with being an archeologist. And all of those things can be really great. They can be really great resources, but you gotta get the hang of them. And kind of when you enter into a CRM company, it's a big machine that's moving pretty fast and you have to kind of catch up with all that stuff. And CRM companies are businesses and they operate as such. And that can be quite different than maybe an academic department, which are used to. Not necessarily better or worse, but definitely different. Another big difference is sort of the scope and the pace of work. So coming out of this program, you're gonna be experts at archeological theory and methods. You can do that at a very high level. You're gonna be great writers and researchers and critical thinkers. No question you're gonna be able to do archeology at a really high level. And those are definitely skills you're gonna mobilize in CRM. But in CRM, especially consulting, archeology in that sort of pure sense is really only one part of your job. And honestly, sometimes it's a small part of your job. When you're coming in with a PhD, you will be doing, like I said, some of that research design, field work, evaluating sites. But as much, if not more of your job is gonna be kind of project management type things, which I know you do project management with your dissertation work, but it's at a whole different level of scale. So you're gonna be tracking budgets and schedules. You're gonna be doing a lot of task delegation. You're gonna be coordinating with other companies and other people doing other types of studies, right? Geological or biological studies for the project you're working on. You're gonna be putting out fires constantly. You have to field questions from clients, all sorts of stuff that take up a lot of time that are not super archeology related. And I know you get pulled in a lot of directions as a grad student, but honestly, when you're working in consulting, you might have sort of like 10 to 15 sort of dissertation project scale things going on at any one time. And they're all at different, they're all kind of at different stages. So yeah, I titled this talk, The Wide and Wild World of CRM Consulting because I thought I was trying to sort of capture that it is a really fast paced environment. It's a really dynamic working environment. It involves doing a really broad range of things, both archeological and non archeological. With that though, is you get to work on a real diversity of projects. And so you get great exposure to a bunch of different stuff. And if you're not actually physically traveling to those areas, you're at least sort of mentally traveling to those areas from your desktop. And so every day you're dealing with unexpected things or new things or getting pushed out of your kind of comfort zone of your research area or your geographic expertise. So that can be a pretty cool and interesting part of the job. And none of this is necessarily meant to be framed as like a good or a bad thing. The reason I bring it up is because I think some people really thrive in that kind of environment, that dynamic environment. And others really don't. And honestly, I don't know if it's the environment I immediately thrived in, right? There was definitely a lot of work on my part. I've definitely never been accused of being super organized or managerial. So even two and a half years into this job, it's something I'm continuously learning about and how to do better and trying to get, trying to grow. Another big difference is kind of the objective of CRM work. So in the academic world, you kind of have free range in a lot of ways to develop a research project, but within CRM, you know, you, like I said, it's a, the consulting world is, it works under a business model. So your objective is to do the best archeology possible within the very defined scope and budget of a particular project. And so while there are mechanisms for reviewing, you know, the quality of the archeology, you are also accountable to the client, the one paying you to do the work. And so sometimes that can be at odds with itself. And so I think to be a good CRM professional and archeologist, you need to have a really strong understanding of the regulatory frameworks. So the laws that guide your actions and possibilities. You need really strong for ethical foundation and you need to be really creative and savvy in finding ways that you can meet the demands of your clients, while also doing, you know, some really good and valuable archeology. And honestly, not all CRM companies are the same in this regard. There can be a lot of window washing and box checking in archeology in any sort of compliance job. So I would really encourage you, if you are thinking about working in CRM to do some research, to talk to people that are in the field, to get a feel for sort of a company culture at any place you might wanna work because there are some areas where the archeology gets sidelined and you probably don't wanna work at a place like that, if I'm being honest. I can really only speak to far Western and I can say that, you know, while we're not always perfect, the archeology is always a primary focus of any work we're doing. And I think I can say that they have a good reputation for doing really quality research focused, meaningful work within that compliance framework and while still meeting the needs of our clients. Yeah, words like clients, you never thought you would be saying so much as an archeologist. So yeah, I'll kind of pause there and shift towards the community engagement side of stuff because that, you know, it sounds like there's some interest in what that looks like in the CRM world. And like everything in the CRM world, the community engagement aspect is really guided by regulations and, you know, honestly, stakeholder consultations that regulations require are probably what any of us would call kind of a bare minimum of community engagement, which is basically like notifying people that a project's happening, asking if they have some sort of desire to be involved in some kind of way, asking if they have particular information that should be included so that the project's in compliance and their involvement can be, the involvement of stakeholders can be really variable based on those responses that you get, but the regulations just kind of require that initial effort and what happens after that can be really variable. That being said, there are some really, there are some opportunities to do really good community-engaged work that go above and beyond the sort of basic requirements. And I think the trick is, is to recognize these opportunities early on and to frame them as a value to the project and to meet any compliance goals and then to write that into the project proposals and budgets and things like that. And, you know, all of us know that doing community-engaged archeology is not only to write an ethical thing to do, but it results in better work all around. So you just have to work that into the project and convince your client that that's the case. So there's a couple of good examples that I can kind of point to about how, projects I've worked on have done that. So this photo on the left here is me, I'm a very cold and foggy day in Marin working with a local tribe. We were surveying an area where we had some information that there could be some pretty important archeological sites that are considered sacred by the local group. And so we, from the very beginning, knowing this information had them involved at almost every stage. And so this is them involved with us in the actual field work going out there. And we wanted to do that because we knew they were gonna see things differently, they were going to interpret things differently. And we were tasked with developing sort of a management plan for this area. And we wanted to make sure we captured those perspectives and doing this kind of stuff, works to build really great relationships with local groups, which CRM has not always had a great sort of history of doing. So I'll say that while compliance is mandated through regulations, a lot of it falls to sort of individual efforts and relationship building. So that's to say that it is totally possible within the CRM world. There's another project I'm working on which is pretty interesting. It's actually a Caltrans project in the East Bay I'm being purposely vague for all sorts of reasons. But we had some money that was sort of tagged for doing some additional archival work. And instead of us being sort of the archeologists saying, great, we'll use this money to do research and answer these kinds of questions. We actually started the process by coordinating with the tribe that we were collaborating with and saying, hey, we have the money to go do this archival work. What are some of the questions that the tribe is interested in exploring? How might we be able to use these funds and this effort to the advantages of the tribe? And again, that only was made possible by really starting that process early on. And then, yeah, this kind of awkward photo of this wonderful gentleman to the right, that's Stan Harlan. He's like, I think he's 95 now. I was working on a project, another Caltrans project, project down on the Big Sur coast, which was really, really great. I'll take any excuse to spend time down there. And of all things, it was another line kill on site. So my dissertation was a line kill on site, so that was fun. But consultation and community engagement, especially in CRM, is really often kind of just thought to mean working with tribes. That is a really important part for obvious reasons, but it also can and should be interpreted more broadly. And we've started doing that by doing outreach and consultation with local historical societies and archives and repositories because they're stakeholders as well. And so with this work, I reached out to the Big Sur Historical Society and they put me in touch with Stan and because he had lived right near, lived and grew up right near where the project area was and his grandfather had actually worked at the line kill when it was in operation in the late 1900, excuse me, late 1800s. And so I was able to actually do an oral history, do an interview and oral history with him and incorporate that into our compliance document and that made for better work and made everyone really happy. So just a couple of examples of the ways in which that has been done productively very recently in my experience. Okay, so already kind of maxing out some time. So I'll kind of try to distill some of these conversation points to what I might call kind of the good and bad of CRM consulting archeology. So I've already kind of mentioned one of the really, what I think is a good aspect of it is the diversity of projects in archeology that you get to engage with, especially after your PhD coming out of your PhD where you've had such tunnel vision and focus on one particular project, it can be really refreshing to kind of pull back and get thrown into all these different projects that are in all different areas, different time periods, different resources, it can be challenging but it can be a really cool part of the consulting world. As I mentioned, it's a very dynamic work environment. You never really know what's going on. You always have a bunch of balls in the air. And like I said, that can kind of be a good or bad thing depending on who you are. Another good thing I think is the development of skills outside of sort of pure strict archeology and archeological methods. So I now am really good at reading engineering plans and managing people and a lot of things that I think make you a better archeologist but could also be extremely valuable in other ways and another careers further down the line. Another good thing about consulting archeology is job availability. There tend to be quite a few jobs available especially in the Bay Area. I was just looking at the SCA job board before this presentation and there are a number of jobs for consulting archeologists at all levels posted right now here in the Bay Area. Development projects are always happening and so this kind of archeological work is always gonna be in need. So that's a good thing. And another thing is the pay. I mean, nobody gets into archeology for the money but CRM does pay fairly well, especially at the position you'd be coming in with coming out of the PhD program. And so you can kind of know that you'll be working in an industry and profession where you can make the livelihood and even maybe survive in the Bay Area. So that's nice. Okay, the bad, not so good. This is us getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere which happens more than I'd like. So a lot of the bad is actually kind of a flip side to the good. So with that diversity of projects there can be a lot of sort of transiency in the consulting world. You might spend, you might be jumping from project to project, you might be living out of a hotel for a month and a half or something or you can be away from home a lot. And so yeah, depending on your own desires and life situation, that could be good, could be bad but something to know about. Again, I've kind of already alluded to this but you spend a lot of your time doing not archeology, doing safety trainings, doing being on calls with clients. I spent three hours on a call the other day talking about design alternatives for an overpass in Modesto. It's not a bad thing per se but if you're looking for a job that's just all archeology all the time, not sure if that job exists but this probably is not that one. And as a general rule, kind of the higher you go up in a serum company the sort of less or dirt archeology you do becomes much more project management type of work. So just something to know of for sort of longer-term career paths. And then again, another thing I sort of already alluded to is that consulting serum is a business to be quite blunt. So everything is really framed by cost. And while that's true for academic research projects to an extent in the serum consulting world, you also have the added layer of profitability, right? And so you're always constantly having to negotiate what you want to do versus what you have to do and then what you can do. So those are conversations you have to have with yourself and your team on a daily level, right? And then finally, maybe a bad is that you don't have a ton of choice in the types of projects you take on in consulting world. You kind of get what you're given, right? So I know in academia, you start off with research questions and this topic you wanna explore and then you're trying to find the perfect site to explore it. And that's just not how serum consulting archeology works, right? You're, the project defines what you're gonna be doing. And sometimes that's really cool like the Lime Kiln project on the Big Sur coast. And sometimes it can be really not cool like the road project in Richmond or something, you know? Like an urban landscape, suburban landscape where there's not a lot going on. So project can sometimes be uninteresting and inspiring and you still have to go in and do really good archeology and produce quality product. So not everything is gonna be a passion project but that's kind of life anyway. So yeah, the last thing I'll sort of leave you with before I turn it over to questions is to let you know that if you've kind of heard this stuff and after we talk through some questions, if you're like, oh, serum consulting, there's some good and there's some bad. I think it's worth thinking about serum as being a really great stepping stone as well to other jobs and positions within the archeology world. You know, if you want a job at state parks or national parks, those are heavily compliance driven and project management driven and you're not gonna get one of those jobs without having some real practical needy experience in the world of CRM and a consulting position will get you that experience very quickly. And even in academia, you know, I think we're all sort of seeing a pattern where many places are looking to hire new faculty that have some background in CRM, recognizing that a lot of undergrads coming out if they're gonna be working in archeology are gonna be working in CRM. So you need to be able to teach classes that prepare them adequately. You need to have faculty that are experienced in that. So it doesn't have to be an either or thing. CRM can be, I think, a great stepping stone to other career options that might meet other sort of desires that you have. Okay, so that was kind of a whirlwind. Hopefully I hit on some things that were of interest to you but as I said, I really wanted to save a good chunk of time to answer any questions or thoughts that you might have. Thanks so much, David, that was great. Folks, turn on your videos on the Zoom here and we can have a discussion and ask away. Oh, look at all those familiar faces. Thanks, I'm expanding you here. If no one has a question immediately, I do have one so I can take my introducer's privilege here, MC's privilege. So it was really great to hear about all of the community engagement work that y'all are doing and one of the things that sort of came to mind for me about that was thinking about dissemination of CRM research as well. And obviously in some cases it's very clear where that goes, like if you started work with a tribe and with their research questions then you're bringing those answers back to them or you're producing them collaboratively together the whole time. But in the case of like talking to Stan and having that connection with like a local historical society, like how does that work as far as like dissemination of your guys' results and that sort of thing. You have some interesting stories about that. Yeah, no, that's a fantastic question. So I mean, with any archaeological work, the main factor surrounding that is privacy and making sure that there's not some sort of protected information that is being too widely distributed. When you are working with tribes they're actually usually the most primary drivers about how far information can kind of flow outside of your sort of project. For again, obvious reasons. So yeah, the data that you produce, I don't wanna say always because as I was saying the tribal involvement can vary from project to project but when tribes are really involved that information is constantly being shared back and forth. And if you're doing it right there's sort of a constant communication from every sort of phase of the project. When it comes to like non-tribal outreach and work that is a really like project by project specific thing. And honestly like a personality by personality thing. So, but again, it all comes down to communication. So when this opportunity to speak with Stan came up I got in touch with the Caltrans archeologists that I was overseeing who was essentially like who we were reporting to and said, hey, this opportunity has come up. I think it would benefit the project in these ways. I wanna make sure that it's cool within the scope of this project to do that. And I wanna make sure that I can share our report with him when we're done, right? And so there was that kind of that clear communication upfront. And so yeah, and sometimes the client will have confidentiality reasons where you can't share it. I mean, I'm working on a project right now where like the overarching bodies the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, you know like the people who keep track of like nukes and stuff and you're like, they're not letting you tell anybody what you're working on. So there are, it's a constant balancing act but when, but yeah, it comes down to sort of communication before you get too far into it and knowing that that's kind of making it clear to the client that the contingency of doing that good work involves sharing that information on the back end. In my experience, you know if there's not some sort of like big security or confidentiality issue, people are supportive of that but it can be really a project specific and personality specific for sure. Thanks so much. Yeah, Lucy has a virtual hand raised. Hi, thank you so much again for doing this. This is really interesting. I have a couple of questions. One about sort of this distinction you mentioned at the beginning between sort of like environmental consulting firms that have an archaeology wing versus an archaeology specific CRM firm. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about that distinction and then this is not so much of a question but just I've been working on sort of a community project with Jordan that has involved some like not actual CRM work but work with CRM data and stuff. And one of the things that's come up a lot is like sites being nominated or not to the National Registry of Historic Places. So I assume that's a significant part of your job, those kinds of things. And I was wondering if you could just speak a little bit about that. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Great questions. So for the first part of your question, it's not that the type of work you do differs too much whether you're working at like an archaeology specific consulting company or for one of these bigger environmental compliance companies. It's just kind of, it's more kind of like organizational structure differences. So like far western, all we do is archaeology, which is really nice. I mean, we have people who do all different kinds of archaeology and we have graphic designers that like help put our reports together. And like I said, and we have like geoarchaeologists, but everything is archaeology specific. So that kind of makes it easier and cleaner in some ways because everything is a little bit kind of self-contained. Everyone's kind of on the same page. And there can be, even at far western, which is actually a pretty small company, there can be some sort of organizational complexity. When you're working for these bigger environmental compliance firms, the archaeology is like one tiny team within this like massive corporation, right? And so it's not that the work you're doing is different, but the way in which it's done might be different. So it's gonna be a much more kind of like corporate structure. There's gonna be a lot more hierarchies. You're probably gonna end up like doing a more narrow range of work, but even that's not totally true. Like it's not a rule across the board. And yeah, and there's gonna be the team in the room next to you. That's like the bio team that's doing work on the same project and stuff like that. So I guess a benefit to that is that there's less communication between companies. And one of those things might handle like multiple aspects of the compliance aspects, multiple aspects of the compliance needs for one project, whereas we will just be one team doing only archaeology and there'll be dozens of other teams doing the other stuff. So yeah, it's kind of nuanced differences. And I'd say if you like, if you think you might be interested in working for like a big company, then those bigger environmental firms would probably be a good fit for you. If you're not, if you're in like a little boutique firm, these smaller compliance, these smaller archaeology specifics might be the one for you. Where I landed kind of tells you what I was looking for and what I wanted and what I like. And obviously I'm probably pretty biased and there's probably someone from a big company that I would tell you why that's so much better. To get to your second question, yeah, I didn't talk at all about what sort of CRM is. I had to kind of assume you guys had a rough working knowledge of that, but happy to answer any specific questions. I meant to make that clear upfront that you might have about that. So yeah, I mean, when it comes down to it, the idea of like is a site eligible or not, it's kind of shorthand for, I mean, that's essentially what we're working towards in CRM because a site that is eligible for the national register means that it has undergone a certain degree of study to determine if it is considered historically significant or not in a legal framing. Historically significant is a legal designation in compliance, environmental compliance world. And what historically significant means, means that you've done the work to decide this is a site that has important qualities that mean it needs to be protected under environmental laws and it needs to be managed. Or you do your study and you find that it doesn't meet the threshold of historical significance, which means it essentially doesn't have any protections, like you don't have to manage it. And it's not quite that clean. Like it's not like a site is recommended eligible and therefore is historically significant and you can't touch it. There are times when a highway realignment cannot avoid an archeological site. So if that site's historically significant, it's gonna have to be impacted or affected in regulatory speak. And so what you do is then you then move on to the mitigation phase, which is where you basically have to come up with some processes to deal with the impacts that that project's gonna have on this significant resource. And so mitigation can look like a lot of different things. In archeology, for archeologically significant resources, oftentimes that's what's called, it includes what's called data recovery, which basically means, okay, this road's gonna destroy the site. This road has to be built, right? Like literally working on a project where Highway 101 is like eroding into the ocean and it's on a steep cliff. There's only so many ways you can reroute it. It has to go through there. It's gonna impact the site. So data recovery, you would focus on like excavating and otherwise acquiring all the data associated with that site or the part that's gonna be impacted and then producing records and reports, that document, that stuff and come up with a curation plan to make that stuff available for future research. With the idea being that if it's the archeological data that makes that site important, then you are mitigating the effects of this development because you're extracting that data and for protecting that data. There's obviously a lot of sort of problematic aspects to that and there's nuances to that. There's other kind of mitigation solutions as well, like it might involve putting up a display or putting funds toward developing curriculum about that site that gets made available to local elementary school students or something like that. But you have to do something to essentially counteract the negative things that are happening to that site. But yeah, but that's essentially at the crux of what the M in CRM is, right? The managing of resources. That's mostly what your job is, is trying to figure out, well, not mostly, but a big part of what your job is, is figuring out, is this a site that we need to manage and how are we gonna manage it? So that's kind of the first step. Thanks. Yeah, you can take a whole class. I could do a whole lecture on that, not that I want to, but you could. Speaking of whole classes on that, we have a question from Bill White in the YouTube chat, which is not about classes, but yes, what does the job market look like for 2021? So that's a great question. So I've been slammed and asking around, people who have been doing this longer than I have, have been talking about how this is kind of almost the busiest they've ever been in their career, which is strange, but also not that strange. You're working on development projects. Like I just said, I'm working on a project that has been funded by Caltrans. A lot of our work is PG&E related. I'm working on a project right now that's a dam in reservoir expansion project. So you're talking about water issues. Like a lot of the stuff is like big picture things that are sort of critical infrastructure. So we were actually tapped early as being considered essential staff or essential services. And it's not that archeology by any measure is an essential service, but because of our legal role that we play in allowing these projects to happen, you can't do these things until they've gone through the environmental review process. So we are kind of like looped into that. So in the same way that utility project, the guys building the utility line, our essential service workers, we kind of have been lumped into that. So all that is to say is that there's a lot of work. Like Far Western is even looking to hire people right now for different, with different backgrounds and specialties. And I know that I was actually just talking to my supervisor yesterday. And it sounds like a lot of companies in the area are also, they're looking to try to build out staff to meet this demand. And I don't know if that kind of like real busy environment will last forever or for years, but I can sort of safely say that there is sort of a continual demand for like, for people that want to do this work and especially for people that can do the kind of job that you're gonna be able to do with a PhD, which is like come in, run a field crew, but also come back to the office and like write up a solid report and be detail-oriented enough to meet all those compliance needs and produce a really solid archeological document. There's a lot of people that can do sort of the entry level field tech work. And there's not necessarily as big of a demand for that, but for people like us, there seems to be a pretty good demand right now. And I don't see anything in 2021 looking forward that would kind of curb that too much. I mean, fingers crossed, hopefully I didn't just jinx this. So yeah, I don't know if there's any other questions. I'm happy to stick around for a few more minutes if you'd like. And we've got a couple more from the chat. Certainly I'll, you know, folks are on the zoom here, have questions, then I'll have those go first since we're here live. But if not, I can funnel in the ones from the chat. I will do. So speaking of probably more field tech sort of work, Chris Lohman asks if there are students who want to get involved, like while they're still undergrads and CRM work, what sort of role that would look like or if they're a particularly good opportunity for that? For sure, yeah, that's a good question. I definitely catered this talk towards grad students, but the undergraduate environment is a little bit different, you know, because unfortunately, and I personally think this is kind of a problem with the industry as a whole, the sort of entry level positions are filled by sort of on-call project by project needs in a lot of places, in a lot of times. So you'll have full-time staff people that just have bachelor's degrees that work for you. You know, Montse and Michelle, who I showed in this presentation are two examples of such people who graduated, they have undergraduate BAs and are now full-time with Far Western, but they have like many, many years of experience doing like field tech work. So working for multiple CRM companies, jumping from project to project. And the downside of that is that there can be big gaps, you know, like between projects, nothing's really guaranteed. It's really actually exploitative labor position, but that's a conversation for another day, you know, and we are, there are some people that are having conversations about unionization and things like that that might address these kinds of things. But on the flip side, what that means is that, you know, if you're still working on your undergrad or you kind of want to dip your toe into it to see if it's something you're interested in, there is opportunity for kind of, you know, like project-based work. So a couple of weeks here or a couple of weeks there and most of the work, most of the field work is done in the summer months, you know, when the weather allows for it, when there's not snow covering everything. Well, in the higher elevations. And so, yeah, I would keep an eye out. There's often, you know, just kind of postings for that kind of field tech on-call work for companies. I know there's a bunch posted right now. I encourage you to get in touch with people like myself or other people that have full-time positions in companies and say, hey, you know, like, can you put me on your list? Cause essentially there's just kind of a running list of people for these sort of seasonal jobs. And when, you know, when our staff is maxed out and we need to fill some positions, we start pulling from that list. And the longer you, the more projects you work with the company and the more you build those relationships kind of a higher on that list, you end up going and getting pulled from. I will say that to really even get kind of that level, that entry level position in CRM, you really have to have some field experience. It is really important to know that, you know, even those on-call positions, you are expected to be a professional archeologist, right? So like, it's not a field school. It's not an opportunity to teach students field methods. There is always kind of in the field teaching and learning going on, you know, even when I go out in the field now, there's people that have been doing serum archeology for 30 years and I learned stuff from them. But you need to kind of know the mechanics of what you're doing out there. Otherwise you're not going to get called back, right? Like it's not an opportunity to learn those things. So I would encourage, if your students are interested, encourage them to, you know, volunteer, do a field school, work on your dissertation project to get that, you know, learning and mentoring experience. And then they'll be, you know, they'll be ready to hit the ground running in those entry level CRM positions. Yeah. We have one more question about sort of a different aspect of things. I'll put it out there. You can answer it at whatever length you feel like you got time for. How does CRM policies relate to historic collections management, post-project excavations and such as ownership and research available, accessioning, or where can I put my excavated artifacts after the project? Yeah, that's a good question. And again, you know, this is kind of stock answer, very project specific. So some larger agencies have their own collection facilities or they have contracts with other collect, not private, but like Sonoma State has a really robust collections facility or they might have contracts with sort of state collection facilities and things like that. So it really depends on where or who you're working with and where your project is and things like that. But that's actually something you have to account for, right, in your, like even in your proposal and throughout the sort of project as the project unfolds. So it's not that you like end up with 80 boxes of stuff and then you're like, oh, where's this stuff gonna go? Like you're not even gonna put a shovel in the ground until everyone's clear about where the stuff's going and who's paying for it particularly because it's not cheap to curate materials. How that kind of fits within the compliance world is kind of gets into that kind of process. Kind of gets into that eligibility historical significance sense, you know, like if it's not a historically significant resource, you don't have to do anything with it. Like it's up to kind of the, you know, the client or you as the consultant to figure out what to do with that stuff. Oftentimes it involves getting buried on site. We're big proponents of donating those collections to like local historical societies or other sort of repositories that might take it for research purposes, even if it's not historically significant, right? Cause, you know, any archeological resource has some potential, but not technically in the compliance world, right? But yeah, but then if it's historically significant and that material is excavated either as part of the testing phase, so kind of getting the data to determine if it's significant or not, or in maybe the data recovery phase or something, then that, you know, that's gonna be paid for at the client's expense as part of doing this cultural resource mitigation phase and in those studies, but how that actually plays out can be really variable. And so that's for the physical stuff for the actual like documents, you know, the site records you produce and the reports you produce, that all gets housed in California at the information system, or excuse me, information centers, which are part of a broader system of basically data management repositories. And there's a bunch of them throughout California that service particular areas. So, you know, the first thing you do when you get a project, you say, we're gonna be working in this area and you request a search of the appropriate info center and they say, you know, here is all the, here are all the projects, the reports that, you know, intersect with that area, here are all the sites in that area or in the buffer around it that you've requested. So when you finish your work, you submit it to those same repositories. So it becomes part of the kind of, that part of the archeological record, yeah. All right, thank you so much, both for the talk and for all of the detailed discussion. You are a font and we are fond of you. Well, thank you for the invitation. I meant to throw my email up there if people wanna follow up with questions or, you know, whatever. Happy to sort of field those individually. So sorry, I didn't include that. It's just David at farwestern.com. So it's pretty easy and you can find me on the farwestern website as well. Great. You got a lot of things rolling in from the YouTube chat as well. And we're very happy to have you on here and hope to, you know, see you in person at some point. Yeah. The non-virtual future. Definitely. I'll crash up your night some way, sometimes. That was good. Yes. All right. All right, take care. Yeah. Thanks everyone.