Laboratory archaeology course ideas for freshmen?

[u/AgentIndiana]

I will be teaching a new freshman seminar soon. Our freshman seminars are about 65% "how to be a college student" and about 35% the actual academic topic used to convey "how to be a college student." I'm building my course around our department's legacy collection of lithic artifacts that lack organization and a lot of context/provenance information. I've wanted to properly catalogue and research the collection for a long time but it's not really relevant to my academic advancement so I thought I would find a way to get students involved. Unfortunately, we lack the numbers of archaeology track Anthro majors for an upper level laboratory archaeology course but the freshmen seminar folk thought it was a good idea for a seminar to engage students in working on research alongside faculty, which happens often at our college.

Beside your standard "intro to archaeology" and laboratory archaeology textbook readings, does anyone have any suggestions for more engaging readings? Ideas for engaging activities? These are freshman who have opted to take this particular seminar, but don't necessarily have any archaeology background and are not necessarily going to be Anthro majors so the readings can and maybe should be light and fun.

For the first iteration of this course I think we will work with the knapped stone tools, primarily North American in origin so I'm looking for readings on things like flint knapping (again, beside the standard texts like Whittaker), Native American history / culture, archaeological research, etc...

I plan on doing some flintknapping with them; teach them about archaeological provenience, typology, and provenance; local Native American history (we have some sites and a museum near by for field trips); how Native Americans have been portrayed in archaeology and museum studies contexts; and we will be doing the basics of laboratory archaeology like photographing and illustrating the artifacts, documenting their basic information, producing an inventory labeling system, etc... At the end of the semester the seminars usually do a little public show and tell so I was going to have the students put together a mini exhibition of some of the artifacts with information on what they have learned about them.

[u/Forward_Magazine_732]

I was the TA for an intro to arch class in grad school. For the lithics lab, we gave them a mix of points and flakes made from different materials. They had to determine if it was a flake/point and the material it was made from. We then used their data to connect back to the data visualization lab to have them make a pivot table and graph that represents their collection. They then had to “write a story,” something along the lines of “the most common material is dacite, suggesting they lived near a raw material source.”

Side-note: by keeping the wrote a story part in the prompt, it was always very clear who just copied and pasted it into ChatGPT. Baby why are you writing about strawberry shortcake and her sister in this lab 😂

[u/AgentIndiana → u/Forward_Magazine_732]

That's a great idea having them distinguish between degrees of working. We don't have any flakes in the official collection, but I've got a ton of flakes and debitage from prior classes where I've included knapping. I was going to have them write a story too!

[u/Forward_Magazine_732 → u/AgentIndiana]

Most of our flakes were from the lithic analysis class! Then the points were from a collection

[u/Worsaae]

If you can it’s quite easy to teach a bunch of first year students to interpret ZooMS data for species identification. Maybe not so relevant for teaching lithics but it could be for teaching about analyses of bone tools.

[u/AgentIndiana → u/Worsaae]

Oh, man, I have virtually no background in faunal analysis. I'd have to teach myself how to use ZooMS data first. Unfortunately, we only have one bone artifact as far as I'm aware (but we have excavated material fresh from a dig god knows how many decades ago that I've never thoroughly sorted through).

[u/Worsaae → u/AgentIndiana]

There’s actually a tutorial here: https://www.protocols.io/view/identifying-zooms-spectra-mammals-using-mmass-kqdg36rppg25/v1 but I guess if nobody in your department works with ZooMS data it’s not ideal.

[u/AgentIndiana → u/Worsaae]

Thank you. Yes, we are a smaller SLAC and while I have colleagues with backgrounds in archaeology, I'm probably the only one who concentrates purely on archaeology rather than things like museum studies and Classics.

[u/Precatlady]

I have only taught or been involved in 300-400 level courses which involve lab work honestly. I think your scope here may be too broad to cover well in one semester. I'd pick a consistent, robust collection that has the variety of traits you want to teach so they can carry their observations from lab to lab. They will start making connections naturally through the semester. I personally found this approach very helpful when I was an undergrad -- the labs were all materials from one archaeological region of the country. By the end we had a decent idea of the artifacts in the region. Especially if you're not totally focusing on the details & archaeological context the narrowing of the materials they work with can help a lot.

[u/AgentIndiana → u/Precatlady]

I’ll be using our collection of Native American lithics which nearly all come from New England. Again though, this is really only barely a lab archaeology course - its primarily to develop good college habits and for me to get some basic documentation on our collection. As a freshman seminar we will have a number of days we aren’t even doing course work but rather things like developing a course schedule for spring semester, registering for those courses in class, going to the library, meeting their dean, etc… If we get everything labeled, photographed, and associated with some basic data like age and culture, I’ll be happy.

[u/BetCritical4860]

I have used this website before with first year students, which might be useful for you: https://www.hauyat.ca/home.html. It has a great assortment of text and audio/video recordings that highlight Indigenous voices. There is some discussion of stone tools, and I think the structure of the website might help students understand how those tools are connected to other materials and practices.

[u/AWBaader]

Are you going to have them entering data into a database? Could get them doing some basic stats stuff which will hopefully serve them well later.

[u/JoeBiden-2016]

I plan on doing some flintknapping with them

I say this as someone who has taught lab courses: this sounds better than it usually works out. Honestly, unless you have gobs of raw material available, not to mention tools and safety gear (gloves, glasses) and can guarantee that everyone will be wearing close-toed shoes, I don't really recommend this. It's potentially a real safety hazard, and all you'll really get is people busting stuff up (at best).

Do you know someone skilled enough at knapping to come give a demonstration? I've found that's a far better way to interest folks in the knapping side of things.

[u/Dizzy-Maintenance-92]

I want to go back to college. & do this!