Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Beyond the Classroom: Campus Archaeology and Community Collaboration," at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This session focuses on the ways that we collaborate on campuses and beyond. This is not simply teaching archaeology in the classroom, but practical education for our students, partnering with community stakeholders, and transforming archaeology into a community-based, activist scholarship. We must challenge the traditional dynamic of archaeology in which the professor is seen as the “gatekeeper” of the past thereby reducing communities and students to “labor.” Students and community stakeholders have deeply rooted connections to the past. As presented in this session, community-based activist projects on campuses deal with an array of issues; including, unwilling administrations, the potential for “embarrassing” histories to be uncovered, and often historically strained relationships between the university and the surrounding communities. We believe that by extending ourselves outside of our departments, we not only further embed ourselves into the campus community, but also make archaeology more relevant as a craft.