The State of Material Culture Training in Historical Archaeology: A Conversation on Best Practices for Teaching Students How to Identify and Analyze Material Culture

Summary

This is a forum/panel proposal presented at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In January 2020, at the SHA Annual Conference in Boston, over 80 attendees took the DAACS Material Culture Assessment. They were asked to anonymously identify the material, ware type, form, and decoration of 35 different artifacts. This panel begins with a summary of the DAACS MCA results, which will be a springboard for a wide-ranging discussion of how archaeologists are trained in material culture at both the object and artifact level. This panel of archaeologists and museum curators will give their perspectives on material culture training, with a focus on their preferred teaching methods. We will debate what works and does not work in material culture training, how archaeologists should evaluate material culture knowledge, and in what way that knowledge, or lack of it, impacts archaeological arguments about the past. Finally, the panel will open a conversation about certification standards for material culture knowledge in the field of historical archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Forum / Panel Proposals   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology