Engagement and Education: The MARTA Archaeological Collection as a Tool for GSU's Experiential Learning Efforts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "The Phoenix Project and the Rebirth of the MARTA Archaeological Collection", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Not only a window onto an important period in the South’s post-Civil War history, the MARTA archaeological collection offers a unique opportunity for students at Georgia State, a large public university located in downtown Atlanta, to interact with a substantial corpus of artefacts excavated from sites around the city, including contexts directly beneath GSU’s campus. Since the collection returned to GSU in 2012, it has consistently been utilized in a broad range of pedagogical activities that span individual graduate thesis research projects to experiential learning classes for freshmen non-majors. We explore the multiple and valuable ways in which GSU students learn about artifact analysis, science and technology in archaeology, archival research, collections management and curation, exhibition practice, and community engaged archaeology from their experiences with the MARTA collection. Highlighting student work, we suggest how learning from and with this historical archaeology collection offers new and impactful directions for archaeological pedagogy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Phoenix Project and the Rebirth of the MARTA Archaeological Collection   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow