Forensic Archaeology and Today’s Student: Managing Expectations and Providing Rigor While Maintaining Best Practices

Summary

Fueled by the media and uniformed academic advisors, students are flooding into the field of forensics, often with unrealistic expectations of success and future employment. Although careers in forensic anthropology and archaeology are difficult to attain, today’s practitioners have the responsibility to prepare and train the field’s future members. This paper discusses the 2014 field season of the Unidentified Persons Project, a twenty-three student forensic archaeology field school that took place in San Bernardino County, California. This paper summarizes methods that were used to evaluate and select students for the project, strategies for setting and maintaining realistic expectations, techniques for minimizing emotional and psychological trauma for participants, and methods employed to maintain academic rigor while promoting best practices of medicolegal investigation.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Forensic Archaeology

Keywords

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