MAKING ARCHAEOLOGY RELEVANT IN THE 21st CENTURY PROJECT

By Alicia Ebbitt, Spring-Serenity O’Neal, and Erin Kuns
Indiana University

A group of professional archaeologists representing many fields within the Society for American Archaeology have made a commitment to revitalize the undergraduate archaeology curriculum to better serve the needs of future archaeologists through the Making Archaeology Relevant in the 21st Century project (MATRIX). This project has produced innovative course materials that introduce students to relevant issues in archaeology and provide students with skills they can apply to careers in archaeology. The course materials will be made available to anyone who has access to the World Wide Web.

A late 1990s survey by the SAA revealed concerns archaeology professors had with ways to retool for new demands in the discipline while maintaining their respect to research and the public. In response to these concerns, Anne Pyburn, Indiana University professor, and her colleague, George Smith, associate director of the Southeast Archeological Center, led the initiative to acquire a three year, half-million-dollar National Science Foundation grant. This grant prompted a national collaboration to enhance archaeology teaching and practices and funded the development of the MATRIX project. The MATRIX was designed to support professional archaeologists faced with a dramatically shifting set of teaching needs by creating an extensive web site filled with resources for archaeology education.

The MATRIX team members have developed a set of classroom-tested course materials that are designed to engage and challenge students. These courses focus on a set of principles devised by the SAA Task Force on Curriculum Reform over a series of SAA conferences: professional ethics and values in archaeology, stewardship, diverse interests, social relevance, communication, basic archaeological skills, and real world problem solving. The newly formulated teaching principles address the changing issues in archaeology and the obligations that archaeologists have as scholars.

In addition to addressing new archaeology education principles, the courses on the MATRIX site provide unique opportunities for hands-on activities and critical thinking in the classroom. Many college professors, particularly archaeology professors are looking for activities and concepts that challenge their students’ views and make them think more analytically. MATRIX courses provide examples of the ways other archaeology professors have had success encouraging dialogue in the classroom.

As scholars who study people, archaeologists need to incorporate new perspectives into the field. Another aim of the MATRIX project is to reach out to the varied interests and ideas of students in the classroom and improve diversity within the field of archaeology. The MATRIX courses help make archaeology more appealing to students who might not ordinarily consider a career in archaeology.

A variety of MATRIX courses are now available: Archaeological Field Methods, the Archaeology of Ethnicity, Archaeological Ethics and Law, Archaeological Methods, Theory and Practice, Museum Methods, Buried Cities and Lost Tribes: New World, North American Archaeology, and Introduction to Archaeology. The course designers are also constructing a new set of courses that will be available on the Web by the end of March 2004. A few of the upcoming courses include: Cultural Resource Management, Landscape Archaeology, Archaeological GIS, and Time and Culture in the Northwest.

A group of educators and education researchers are also on the MATRIX team providing a pedagogical perspective to the project. The educators have contributed insight about original learning methods and innovative teaching tools.