High School Students, Archaeology, and Public Outreach

Summary

Since 2009, an archaeological field program for high school students has conducted excavations at the Mary M.B. Wakefield Estate in Milton Massachusetts. Co-Directed by two graduate students in Boston University’s Department of Archaeology, this program has taught professional level excavation methods to dozens of local and non-local students for two two-week sessions each July. These students work alongside graduate volunteers as they learn to excavate small to large units, draw plan views and profiles, and wash and handle all types of artifacts. From excavating a late eighteenth-century summerhouse foundation to an early nineteenth-century cobble-paved yard, these students are also expected to aid the co-directors in interpreting the past by connecting their individual units with what past activities and episodes their stratigraphy and artifacts represent. This poster will present our experience with working with high school students, integrating our program within recent developments in community-archaeology. Our poster will address the particulars of our program but also seek to show the benefits of teaching archaeological skills to high school students beyond the context of archaeology.

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