In anthropology departments, graduate students must contend with cultural, social, linguistic, and physical anthropology, as well as archaeology. This leads to strength in the behavioral component of archaeology, but undesirable weakness in all other components of modern archaeology. The Universities of Arizona, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin are examples. In classics departments, archaeology is not only narrowly proscribed, but the requirements in Greek and Latin prevent the student from undertaking significant environmental or technical studies. I might add that it is equally hard to get any geoarchaeology into geology departments.
All interdisciplinary effort goes against the grain of current university departmental structures.
In enumerating some of the problems of archaeometry in anthropology and classics departments, I have not even mentioned the lack of scientific laboratories. Perhaps the curricula will broaden in most institutions. We will establish additional archaeology departments, following in the footsteps of the rest of the modern world and Boston University in the United States. In some universities we will integrate archaeology and archaeometry into interdisciplinary graduate programs such as the Center for Ancient Studies at the University of Minnesota. In this paper I do not propose a large scale restructuring of university archaeological education in the United States.