Investigating a Shelter in Oklahoma Schools: Bringing Museum Artifacts into the Classroom

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Oklahoma, giving K-12 students hands-on experiences with real artifacts can be challenging when collections are inaccessible in museum repositories. To make archaeology accessible to all students at the national level, Project Archaeology’s Investigating Shelter (2009) for grades 3-5 supplements social studies and science curricula, using archaeological methods and anthropological themes to teach children about the past. The culminating activity of this unit is a hands-on module in which students place replica artifacts or pictures of artifacts onto a map of a real archaeological shelter and make inferences on the kinds of activities that occurred there. The Oklahoma Public Archaeology Network (OKPAN) has partnered with Oklahoma school teachers, descendant communities, the BLM, and Plains archaeologists to create a Project Archaeology module based on data and artifacts from a real archaeological site in Oklahoma. This work brings us one step closer to our goal of making local archaeology accessible to all students in their own classrooms.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24056