Uncovering New Opportunities: Community Colleges and Archaeological Lab Experience

Summary

There is a perception that community colleges offer few practical opportunities to students interested in archaeology. Through an agreement with California State Parks and the support of our college, we established the Cosumnes River Archaeological Working Lab (CRAWL) to provide community college students hands-on training with artifacts. This paper discusses the project and findings, logistics of starting a community college lab, and benefits of exposing novice students to archaeological lab techniques. The Enterprise Hotel site in Old Sacramento was excavated thirty years ago but the collection was orphaned and left unanalyzed until 2012. Through a new agreement, State Parks has loaned part of the collection to the college for cataloging and analysis. CRAWL, now in its third year, has trained dozens of students, supported presentations at conferences, and is a step to field school and four-year universities. The lab, run on volunteer hours and virtually no budget, has established connections with area universities which offer assistance in technical analysis and the use of comparative collections. Community colleges can play an active role in providing lab experiences for students and in fostering relationships between the colleges, state agencies, and research institutions to promote cultural preservation and public outreach in California.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage