Reimagining “Archaeological Field Methods”: Insights on Integrating Campus Excavation, Classroom Instruction, and Critical Discussion

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reflects on an archaeological field methods course designed for Gettysburg College and taught in fall 2021. This course, which we will continue to teach in coming years, represents a new offering at the college and meets a growing need to train anthropology majors who wish to focus on archaeology as a career. Students enrolled in the course in fall 2021 participated in the excavation of the college’s “janitor’s house,” which was in use from the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. The excavation provided students with hands-on archaeological experience without having to leave campus or spend money on external field schools. Furthermore, because the course was a semester long and involved intensive course reading, writing assignments, and discussion, students had time and space to critically contextualize our archaeological research within broader histories and in relation to various theoretical frameworks. We will discuss which aspects of the course were successful as well as those that were not, and we will offer guidelines for others interested in designing a similarly integrated methods course for undergraduates.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Archaeology Classroom   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35691.0