Clare Rainsford
Independent / Associate Staff, University of York
I have a ridiculous job. There are no benefits: no statutory leave, no paid sick leave, no maternity leave, no printing allowance, not even an office Christmas party. There is no office. I am regularly requested to work on weekends and bank holidays. My boss is terrible about letting me have enough time off, especially when there are deadlines coming up. She either lands me with too much work or too little, and she requires a cast-iron case to be made for the utility of any training, research, or conference attendance. Some months I get paid well for what I do, but the work is piecemeal and so my pay depends more-or-less directly on how much I have taken on.
I am, as the title suggests, a freelance zooarchaeologist. I am self-employed; I am my own terrible boss; and I would not start an article with a list of complaints about my job if I did not actually love it (I am British. This is a cultural thing). I have been a paid zooarchaeologist for more than a decade and have been running my own business based in York since 2017. My bread and butter is the writing of grey literature reports on animal bone from excavations conducted prior to construction projects in the UK. I am an adjunct to commercial archaeology; in the UK, this is the archaeology which is carried out by commercial units under the terms of PPS5 (Planning Policy Statement 5), which continues to enshrine developer-funded archaeology in the planning process. However, I also work for universities (dealing with bone from grant-funded research digs) and community archaeology groups. The latter typically have remarkably little funding for their excavations, but in spite of this they are still among the most determined of my clients to pay me properly and promptly. I teach community courses, mostly for the local centre for Lifelong Learning. I match-make university researchers with appropriate assemblages or samples to use in their research. Every once in a while, I will get an assemblage of bone interesting enough that I can get a publication out based on it (e.g., Rainsford et al. 2021, Rainsford 2020, Rainsford and O’Connor 2016).
How did I end up here? Like most of us, I graduated with my PhD with no specific plans and a profound feeling of exhaustion. Prior to the PhD, I had worked in commercial archaeology and had made a name for myself locally as a competent ‘bones’ person. I had been taking small pieces of freelance bone identification work from contacts within my network throughout my PhD (which helped top up my grant) and had two projects left over to complete when I had submitted my thesis. This inadvertently left me perfectly positioned to start life as a sole trader.
Contrary to what the title suggests, there is no standard ‘day in the life’ when your job is ‘bones person for hire’. I mostly work from home; I have a small room set aside for an office and a large amount of shelving in the garage where I store bone assemblages. See Figures 11 and 12. In the next few years, I am hoping to have a shed built in the back garden where I can do most of the practical work and keep more of the mud out of my actual house. Working on an assemblage involves a combination of hands-on identification and recording, data processing and analysis, report-writing and—sometimes—some chasing down of references in the library or via Google Scholar. How long this takes depends entirely on the size of the assemblage. The largest project I have done to date was the assessment for a bypass, which had produced over a hundred crates of animal bone and which took me months. The smallest consisted of three tiny bags of cremated bone, about which I could say almost nothing; the whole project from assessment to report was completed in a matter of hours. However, in addition to this is all the stuff that comes with not being part of a larger organisation. I do all my own administration, including banking, tax returns, quoting for work, responding to enquiries, and purchasing equipment (mostly finds bags, of which you can never have enough). An amazing amount of time gets taken up just moving boxes of bone between places. Getting hold of the assemblage I have been contracted to look at is relatively easy when it comes to local companies or community groups: either I drive over, or they do. For longer-distance transport, we rely on ordinary parcel couriers. It is a perk of my job that I have the weirdest post ever. Early on in my freelancing career I missed a delivery and had to walk over to the sorting office to collect a box of bone. On the way back, I passed York Minster and considered stopping in for the service, before realising that attending the All Souls Day Requiem Mass with a box of cremated bone was perhaps not advisable.
There is no telling what any as-yet-unseen box is going to contain. This is where the job never gets old. In terms of my publication record and research interests, I am a specialist in the Roman and post-Roman period in the UK focusing on ritual and funerary practices, but also in animal bone taphonomy in deep urban stratigraphy. However, my job requires me to be a jack-of-all-trades. This year alone, I have examined bone from the entire geographical breadth of the UK (from the Orkney islands in the north-east to Wiltshire in the south-west), and from the first millennium AD to the eighteenth century.
Figure 11. Storage for zooarchaeological bone assemblages for analysis. Photo by C. Rainsford.
Figure 12. Rainsford’s bone storage space. Photo by C. Rainsford.
I was not a specialist in the Yorkshire Iron Age before a colleague of mine started sending me the bone from several fantastic Iron Age sites on the Wolds (work on which is still ongoing). For someone who never really wanted to specialise, such variety is my version of living the dream. I get to go from learning about medieval urbanism in the north-east one month to digging into Roman ritual practices in the south-west the next. If one assemblage consists of poorly preserved unidentifiable fragments from acidic soils up by Hadrian’s Wall, the next might be waterlogged preservation with hundreds of frog bones from medieval Winchester. When I reach the limits of my knowledge, I contact colleagues to ask whether they have seen this very odd pathology before, or whether they have a formula for calculating horse withers heights. The only boundary I draw is with fish bone. British fish are little horrors with subtle morphological variations and enormous size variations, and quite honestly someone else is welcome to them. Many, many zooarchaeologists feel the same (and that is why we have fish specialists in the field).
The downsides of the job I mentioned at the outset. I manage the financial instability as best I can by spreading my client base widely and taking on teaching where I can; regardless, it would still be worrying to be reliant on this to pay a mortgage. Attendance at conferences is difficult, as conferences are very often priced for university academics with a research budget. Writing a paper, travel, and attendance take time out of actually paid work. Similarly, writing up articles for publication is an unpaid pursuit and therefore gets edged out by ‘proper’ jobs. All of which means that I keep a fairly low academic profile, along with many of my other colleagues working in the commercial sector. This is not to say that our projects are not interesting, or that we do not have really good ideas. Simply, our jobs are not structured so as we can share them by means of the usual routes. Additionally, intellectual property rights are owned by the people who pay for the work, so I am not permitted to share details on every site on which I work. Social media fills some of these gaps, as do blogs. My X (Twitter) account is my main portal to the world (@littlebonelady); a position which is now looking increasingly vulnerable.
I have been a freelancer now for nearly six years. From this perspective, there are three pieces of advice I would offer my younger self. Firstly, quoting for work is an art not a science. However much information you have about the assemblage, you will still get it wrong, simply because each project is different and presents its own complexities. Learning to manage this gracefully comes with time. Secondly, being on good terms with a university department is something for which to be grateful. I maintain a small teaching collection but do not maintain a large reference collection of my own. All my problems get walked into the University of York, whose reference collection has been built up over forty to sixty years and comes attached to a department with zooarchaeologists who can often sort me out before I even reach the lab. The library and e-journal access that comes with being associate staff is also worth its weight in gold. Thirdly, it is impossible to have the right amount of work on. The work oscillates between months with deadlines coming at you like a winter hailstorm and months where there is only one box of bone in the store and it does not need to be finished until Christmas. This is a way of life, and it is the one you chose.
I still believe I have a ridiculous job. I spend my life being sent centuries-old animal bone through the post and being paid to write reports on it. Try to explain that to the bank, or to my neighbour, or to Doris who sits next to me at church. It is enough to make you consider retraining as an accountant. However, for me, zooarchaeology is the study of the relationship between animals and humans in the past, a field of study which is becoming ever more essential with the climate crisis and our rapid race towards the Sixth Mass Extinction. How did we get here? How can we change our perceptions and culture enough to change our actions? Compared to Western culture today, our relationship with animals in the past was complex and intimate: we herded them, milked them, used their dung to grow crops, and took the wool from their backs to spin clothing. We killed them, ate them, used their bodies in rituals, their bones to make jewellery, and the enzymes from their stomachs to make cheese. We used their skins to write our legal documents and their feathers to fletch arrows to wage our wars. My work is often relatively invisible. It does not typically result in newspaper headlines, appearances on Digging For Britain, or journal articles and conference presentations. It is not financed by high-profile research grants and it only rarely alters what we think we know about the archaeology of the UK or the history of our intertwined lives. But, as ever in science, my work is part of the steady accretion of information which makes it possible to tell new and richer tales about the animal-human relationship, and I consider it a privilege to be a part of unfolding these stories.
References
- Rainsford, C. 2020. Animal Bone. In I. Armit & L. Buster (eds) Darkness Visible: The Sculptors Cave, Covesea, from the Bronze Age to the Picts. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: Edinburgh.
- Rainsford, C., King, T., Jones, S., Hooker, R., Burleigh, G. 2021. Cremated animal bone from two ritual/ceremonial sites in Britannia. In S. Deschler-Erb, U. Albarella, S. Valenzuela Lamas, G. Rasbach, Roman Animals in Ritual and Funerary Contexts: Proceedings of the 2nd Meeting of the Roman Period Working Group, Basel, 1st-4th February 2018. Deutsches Archaologisches Institut.
- Rainsford, C. and O’Connor, T., 2016. Taphonomy and contextual zooarchaeology in urban deposits at York, UK. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 8, pp.343-351.
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