Drilling crews are eager to plunge their equipment into the ground. Road builders are ready to start highway projects, and construction workers need to dig. But across the hyperactive oil fields of North Dakota, these and other groups have to wait for another team – archaeologists, who often must survey the land before a single spade of dirt can be turned. The routine surveys have produced a rare jobs bonanza in American archaeology, a field in which many highly educated professionals hop from project to project around the world and still struggle to make a living. The positions also come with a constant tension: The archaeologists are trained to find evidence of the past, but the companies that pay them would prefer not to turn up anything that gets in the way of profits. Without the oil boom, a lot of young archaeologists might “never […]