Often. I've a colleague who started in Sociology, moved to Art History, and is currently in English.
But it's not straightforward, and you need to get your strategy right. What you need to concentrate on is what you are going to be able to offer a hiring committee. Why should they hire someone whose background is in archaeology for an anthropology position, when they've got plenty of anthropologists applying who will be able to teach all their undergraduate courses? So you either need to find the department who really needs someone to be a bridge between archaeology and anthropology, or be just as well qualified as an anthropologist as the person with the BA, MA and PhD in Anthropology AND bring your 733t archaeology skillz, or your work needs to be to be just so bloody good that their department can't afford not to hire you.
Think about it from that point of view and remember you're in a very competitive market whichever way you turn, and that should help you work out what's possible.
This is good advice, and much more helpful re: strategy than my post, sorry! I have "sold" myself to classics departments on the basis of plenty of language-teaching experience, plus a specialism (in reception/translation) that is currently increasingly fashionable but under-staffed, and which a lot of graduate students are gravitating towards. But it's definitely not the easiest path, and despite lots of publications some departments just aren't interested!
Not impossible. I've switched back and forth repeatedly between classics and English (because my interests overlap with both); I'm now (hopefully) settled in classics but I did my BA in classics, an MPhil in Renaissance English, a PhD in English (but was teaching mostly Latin and Greek), then a Junior Research Fellowship (post-doc) which was theoretically in English but during which I was a member of both departments and taught in both; and now I have a lectureship straightforwardly in classics. It would probably have been easier for me to get a lectureship in English because most of my early publications are in English/comp lit journals, but I decided during the post-doc that I'd rather be a classicist. During this lectureship I'm focusing on getting a couple of "pure" classics publications out to further my chances of a permanent classics job.
The point is that the OP is asking about people who switched field post-PhD. Lots of people get a bachelors degree in one field and a master's in another (it is the norm in my field, for instance); things become much more complex when you have completed your graduate studies, as you can see from other replies here. I believe uberconfused was giving you the benefit of the doubt in assuming that your husband had already completed his PhD and gotten a job in academia (since that is what the OP is interested in), not questioning his potential for success.
It can't hurt to ask the department you're considering applying to -- some places are picky. When I was job hunting I came across a position in an Anthropology department that I thought I was very well suited for, so I wrote and asked if they'd consider an application from someone whose PhD is in Cultural Geography. They wrote back and said, basically, "absolutely not; it must say 'anthropology' on your degree."
I know a few people who've moved from physics to epidemiology, but in that case it's saying "I have these great skills that will transfer to your discipline pretty easily".
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But it's not straightforward, and you need to get your strategy right. What you need to concentrate on is what you are going to be able to offer a hiring committee. Why should they hire someone whose background is in archaeology for an anthropology position, when they've got plenty of anthropologists applying who will be able to teach all their undergraduate courses? So you either need to find the department who really needs someone to be a bridge between archaeology and anthropology, or be just as well qualified as an anthropologist as the person with the BA, MA and PhD in Anthropology AND bring your 733t archaeology skillz, or your work needs to be to be just so bloody good that their department can't afford not to hire you.
Think about it from that point of view and remember you're in a very competitive market whichever way you turn, and that should help you work out what's possible.
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For example, my husband has both a BA in History and a MA in Communication Studies- Rhetoric.
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Professionally, he'll be just fine...
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