Reflections on-field mentoring and diverse archaeology student engagement at Boomplaas Cave

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Lab to the Field: Pioneering Approaches to Undergraduate Mentoring in Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reflects on a multi-year technical training and capacity-building program at Boomplaas Cave in South Africa's southern Cape region. Boomplaas is one of Africa’s flagship Middle and Later Stone Age archaeological sites and provides a unique environment to train students in state-of-the-art field research methods developed through the Human Origins, Migration, and Evolution Research (HOMER) consortium’s field training program. Over the past four years, the project has provided 54 predominantly African female undergraduate and graduate students with this unique training opportunity. We have four major goals concerning this training: 1) increase diversity and provide field experience to excellent students irrespective of their financial ability to participate, 2) broaden student perspective to multiple regions and archaeological contexts, 3) provide high-quality field training, and 4) teach a culture of international scientific cooperation. This experience is unique because students work in an environment that crosses national boundaries. This broader context gives students a wider perspective on the “big issues” in human evolution research. Participants in the Boomplaas field training gain transferable technical and analytical skills, an understanding of the transdisciplinary nature of science, an appreciation of the need to operate in international and multi-cultural modes of science, and a life-changing multicultural experience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• From the Lab to the Field: Pioneering Approaches to Undergraduate Mentoring in Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50684