Teaching Cultural Complexity through Experimental Archaeology of Composite Artifacts

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Experimental archaeology is an inherently interdisciplinary field that fills gaps in our knowledge about the past by practically testing the production and use of material culture through collaborations between academics, skilled craftspeople, museum curators and public historians. Similarly, the material culture of most societies is “interdisciplinary” in that many things are produced not by a single craftsperson, but by communities of people who pass on production techniques, engage in trade, and work collaboratively to combine multiple materials and specialty skills into complex, composite artifacts. This paper discusses a pedagogical approach to teaching experimental archaeology as a series of linked units that deconstruct composite artifacts and processes in order to better understand the complexity of past lived experiences. The case study undergraduate course, taught in 2021, revolved around the central question: “How much (and what type of) work was required to make an English woman’s outfit c.550CE?” To answer it, weekly lab experiments investigated spinning and vegetable-dying wool (for yarn), green woodworking (for building a loom), pottery formation and firing (for ceramic loom weights), weaving on a loom (for cloth) and tablets (for trim), and bronze casting (for brooches). The resulting historical understanding was greater than the sum of these parts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37884.0