Making, Baking, Breaking, and Cutting: Experiential Learning through Enacting the Past

Summary

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

Concepts, such as the “chaîne opératoire” and “communities of practice” are central to material analyses and student training at the Gadachrili Gora Regional Archaeological Project Expedition (GRAPE), Republic of Georgia. Teaching abstract conceptual frameworks to undergraduate students is a challenging task for instructors in the classroom, never mind in the field where students are mentally exhausted after a long day of hard work under the sun. As such, team specialists at GRAPE have incorporated experiential teaching methods to facilitate student understanding of the “chaîne opératoire” and “communities of practice.” Through the enactment of pottery manufacture, obsidian knapping, bone tool production, and sheep carcass butchering, students have been fully able to comprehend these conceptual frameworks and apply them to analyses carried out on recovered archaeological materials from the field. This paper will look at how these experimental methods not only were a good way to build competence among students but also a deeper nuanced understanding of the entanglements attested across the various crafts and the spatiotemporal demands required in past crafting activities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39717.0