TEACHING ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURYTEACHING ARCHAEOLOGYIN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYSOCIAL RELEVANCEElizabeth Terese Newman and Benjamin WestElizabeth Terese Newman, History and Sustainability Studies, Stony Brook University. Benjamin West, Anthropology, Dickinson College.This article continues the series on SAA’s Seven Principlesof Archaeological Curriculum, introduced byKathryn Kamp, Kellie Jenks, and Tammy Stone in theJanuary 2014 issue of the SAA Archaeological Record. Here,we discuss the fourth principle, Social Relevance, originallydescribed in the SAA Bulletin in 1999 and then expandedupon in book form in 2000 (Bender and Smith 2000; Davis,et al. 1999).IntroductionIn a day and age when state governors call for the defundingof anthropology programs at public universities and theU.S. Congress debates funding social science researchthrough the National Science Foundation, the ability toarticulate the social relevance of archaeology is more pressingthan ever. As professionals, we need to be able to articulatearchaeology’s relevance, but, just as importantly, we alsoneed to train our students to articulate it as well. When confrontedwith the question, “Is archaeology socially relevantand why?” many of the undergraduate anthropology majorswe informally surveyed responded immediately in the affirmativeto the first part of the question but struggled with thesecond. Everybody seemed to believe that archaeology matters,but few could get beyond the justification that thosewho are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it. Forthose of us who have dedicated our lives to studying thepast, this may be sufficient justification, but for many wholive in the present and worry about the future, that particularargument can come across as a tired trope. Both we andour students need to be able to justify how and why thestudy of the past fits into the present. Further, the undergraduatearchaeology classroom, often well-stocked withstudents from other majors seeking to fulfill general educationrequirements in an alluring field, is an ideal place tospread the message beyond the confines of our own field. Ifwe look across the college curriculum, we can find manyopportunities to “proselytize.”Making Archaeology Socially RelevantIn 1999, the Undergraduate Education Work Group at theSAA Workshop “Teaching Archaeology in the Twenty-FirstCentury” highlighted the importance of communicating thesocial relevance of archaeology to our students and to thewider general public. They explained, “If we are to justify theexistence of archaeology as a discipline and gain public interestand support, then we must effectively show how archaeologybenefits society” (Davis et. al. 1999). The authorsexpressed concern that such justifications were left implicitin the presentation of class materials, on the assumptionthat the relevance would be self-evident to students (thoughit often was not). Our informal survey suggests that this concerncontinues to be valid.The 1999 Work Group listed six suggested subtopics whichwould allow for an emphasis on the social relevance ofarchaeology: environment as a catalyst for both the rise andfall of past societies; the relationship of warfare to politics,economics, and “other historical circumstances”; the historyof cities and urban life; the applicability of archaeologicalmethod to current public policy in areas as diverse as forensic/warcrimes studies and garbage/waste management; systemsof social inequality in the past and their implicationsfor the present; and the history of human health and disease.Though it has been 15 years since this list was drawn up, allsix subtopics are clearly still relevant, even urgently so, in themodern world, and all could draw on a wealth of archaeologicalcases in a variety of classroom settings.In the SAA Curriculum Committee’s recent survey of coursesyllabi (see Kamp 2014 for a summary of results), the topic12 The SAA Archaeological Record • May 2014
TEACHING ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURYof social relevance in archaeology took fourth place in orderfrom most to least emphasized of the original seven proposedprinciples. It is most often dealt with in topical andtheory courses and least often emphasized in methodscourses or during field schools. This trend may be a symptomof a certain level of discomfort with operationalizing thisprinciple at all levels of the profession, or, alternatively, a signthat social relevance is, indeed, often left as an implicit lessonrather than made an explicit one. That said, the originalguidelines laid out by the 1999 Work Group suggest thatsocial relevance should be emphasized in large enrollmentand introductory courses where the principle was likely toreach the widest audience— from majors to non- majors—though they targeted only world archaeology and areaarchaeology courses as the likely and appropriate venues forthe introduction of the principle (Davis et. al. 1999). On thisfront, we can count ourselves doing well, as social relevancewas the most popular component of the seven principles onthe survey of introductory syllabi and, within its own category,appeared most frequently on topical, though not area,courses. In spite of this, we must not be complacent. Thesocial relevance of archaeology, and the importance of beingable to accurately express that social relevance, is clear. In thenext section, we will focus on the implementation of two ofthe original six suggested subtopics as examples for integrationacross the college curriculum.Case One: Environmental Change“Sustainability” is a buzzword on many college campusesthese days, and it is an ideal field into which archaeologymay be integrated to highlight the social relevance of thefield. On some campuses, Sustainability has become a standaloneprogram; on others, and more commonly, studentswith the goal of working in a sustainability-related field (be itclean energy, business, or city planning, to name just a few)are trained in environmental studies programs. Students inthese programs are often so focused on the present and thefuture that they forget that the past also has things to teachus. Offering courses that attract such students and at thesame time meet university general education requirementsis an effective way of extending the message that archaeologyis relevant outside the confines of the department.Students in these fields especially, but also in a wide range offields relating to the physical and natural sciences, spendmuch of their classroom time learning about the impacts ofclimate change on our world today and grappling with potentialsolutions for the future. Most are unaware that pre-modernsocieties have also been confronted with a wide range ofenvironmental issues— from natural disasters to climatechange— and have dealt with those issues with varyingdegrees of success. Courses exploring past social responsesto climate change offer these students an opportunity to puttheir studies about the present and anxieties about the futureinto perspective, and archaeologists have done an excellentjob of publishing volumes suitable for the classroom thataddress questions about environmental change in the past,discuss human responses, both good and bad to thosechanges, and articulate the relevance of these studies tomodern policy decisions (e.g., McAnany and Yoffee 2010;Redman 1999; Schwartz and Nichols 2006).Case Two: Social InequalityJust as archaeological treatment of human-environmentalrelationships increasingly complements the curricula of thesocial and physical sciences, archaeology’s application ofsocial theory from many fields in the humanities and thesocial sciences permits students to consider the archaeologicaldimensions of larger questions in their other nonarchaeologyclasses. Social inequality, as it has been constructedalong lines of gender, race and ethnicity, and casteand class, possesses significant time depth and variation.Works from the last several decades render these categoriesand their origins increasingly visible in the archaeologicalrecord and call into question the “natural” inequality we seein the present (e.g., Hastorf and Johannessen 1993). Coursesthat explore constructions such as race or masculinityand that trace their variation over time will benefit from theaddition of archaeological sources into syllabi. Along thesame lines, students performing coursework in archaeology,either toward a degree or as a component of a liberal artscurriculum, should enjoy options that tackle the sameissues of power and privilege encountered in classes outsideof the anthropology program.Archaeology contributes perspectives and evidence thatenrich the discourse surrounding those topics in other disciplines.For example, works regarding the origin of states andthe emergence of social inequality (e.g., Marcus and Feinman1996) pose new questions and offer challenginganswers to students in disciplines such as Philosophy andPolitical Science who are accustomed to reading theoristslike Hobbes, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Archaeologistsborrowing research questions from history and sociologyoffer new data sets to students of these disciplines, documentingstruggle and strife in the historic past in ways thatdocumentary research alone can never establish. These contributionscan acquire increased relevance if the researcharea is local, helping students perceive how archaeologicalknowledge serves to enhance and form community and aMay 2014 • The SAA Archaeological Record13
Change language