“We’ve never been allowed to fail before!” Undergraduate Experimental Archaeology Courses at the Crossroads of History and Archaeology

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.

For five years, we have cotaught an undergraduate Introduction to Experimental Archaeology course under the auspices of the history department at a small university. In this paper, we examine the ways in which history and experimental archaeology share traditions of scholarship, learning objectives, and appeal to students. Yet, at the same time, differences between the two fields create opportunities for both. We highlight the ways in which experimental archaeology offers students the chance to play and to fail. In other words, students may try out skills, theories, or experiments in which outcomes are unknown. Our students have consistently remarked on and appreciated the freedom this offers them, especially as graduates of a school system based on No Child Left Behind. Historians, too, tend to be conservative about exploring data that will not support a suspected thesis. From a pedagogical standpoint, therefore, experimental archaeology offers advantages that go well beyond the material being taught. On the other hand, connections to a history department offers archaeologists access to a much larger student body and to broader historical narratives to which their research may be tied.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39278.0