Archaeology is a discipline that has long captured the imaginations of the public. Despite the reality that the academic field has been dominated by female graduates since the 1970s, persistence in the discipline has been only recently parsimonious, if not male dominated. The present study explores patterns in gender representation within popular conceptions of archaeological field and lab work. We recorded visual trends within Archaeology magazine, a publication of the American Institute of Archaeology and the field's most popular general public magazine, from 1948 to 2020. Through examination of the photographs featured within the articles, we find that men are over-represented in all aspects of pictorial representation. Although the rates of women photographed as archaeologists has increased through time, average representation of women more than 30% has only occurred after 2015. As the magazine has increased the number of photographs per article throughout the years, our data indicates that the total number of men will continue to outpace the representation of women. We discuss these findings in historical context of gender imbalances within the field, popular conceptions of archaeology, and intersections between gender and other social categories.