The SHA is looking for student volunteers to give minimally 8 hours of their time during the SHA Conference in exchange for free conference registration. If you are a student and would like to volunteer your time in exchange for the opportunity to attend the SHA 2014 Conference at no charge, complete the information and the volunteer schedule hosted at http://www.sha2014.com/volunteers.html and return both to Conferium (the address is on the form). You will be reimbursed for the amount of your basic registration rate IF you are accepted as a volunteer. Please note you must pre-register for the conference at the appropriate student rate and also register for any workshops, tours, Roundtable luncheons, the reception at the Musée de l’Amérique francophone or the Awards Banquet wish to attend.

Applications will be accepted according to organizational needs on a first-come/first-served basis until December 6, 2013. Although priority will be given to bilingual speakers (English and French), all are welcome.

Les étudiants bénévoles sont essentiels au bon déroulement des colloques de la SHA. En participant à une variété de tâches – de l’enregistrement des congressistes à la mise en place du « Book Room », en passant par le suivi des sessions elles-mêmes – les bénévoles participent au bon déroulement de toutes les activités organisées dans le cadre du colloque.

Le comité organisateur de la SHA est à la recherche d’étudiants prêts à donner bénévolement un minimum de 8 heures de leur temps durant le colloque en échange de leur inscription gratuite. Si vous êtes un étudiant et que cela vous intéresse, vous n’avez qu’à compléter le formulaire, ainsi que l’horaire figurant au verso, que vous trouverez à l’adresse http://www.sha2014.com/volunteers_fr.html et à retourner le tout à Conférium à l’adresse indiquée sur le formulaire. Nous vous rembourserons du montant des frais d’inscription de base si votre candidature est retenue. Vous devez vous inscrire au colloque et à toute autre activité –atelier, visite guidée, dîner table-ronde, la réception au Musée de l’Amérique francophone, le banquet d’honneur, etc. – si vous souhaitez y participer.

Les candidatures seront retenues selon les besoins organisationnels et selon le principe du « premier arrivé, premier servi » jusqu’au 6 décembre 2013. Même si tous sont les bienvenus, la priorité sera accordée aux personnes bilingues (français et anglais).

This past winter, members of the APTC started kicking around the idea of putting together a set of webinars to offer training and instructional opportunities for the SHA during the year between the conferences. These would supplement the annual conference workshops, which will remain unchanged.

Webinars (a portmanteau of “web” and “seminars”) are on-line sessions where attendees can interact (audio at least, also video if people have cameras in their computers) and, depending on the software involved, view the moderator’s desktop together. Webinars are increasingly common in business and other fields, and they allow  people scattered across the globe to meet to discuss business, undergo training, or just catch up, all at minimal cost.

The APTC would like to see members of the SHA interested in hosting or attending such web-based training sessions step forward with ideas for webinars. These could range from technical material like database management, curation techniques, or remote sensing applications to theoretical, topical, or regional topics. Professional development topics such as job hunting or transforming your dissertation into a book (thanks, Myriam Arcangeli [@Terrailles]) would also work. The field is very wide open.

Some Things to Consider

One of the benefits of this medium is the low cost. In its initial stages, we would run the webinars through systems such as Google Hangout (with up to 10 seats) or Blackboard Collaborate (for more). With no room to rent, no travel to subsidize, and only the host’s fees (if there are any) to defray, we envision these to be among the most cost-effective development tools available.

There are, of course, a few obstacles. Depending on your preferred method of content delivery (audio only, audio and video, chat), you place different data and computing demands on participants. If an attendee is on a dial-up connection, they may not be able to stream video. Also, some of the webinar delivery systems require downloaded content that, while not usually excessively resource-hungry, may require some lead time for users to get approved and installed (I’m looking at you, Department of Defense archaeologists).

Webinars and the Student Member

As webinars let people log in from wherever they can get internet coverage, they do not require the travel funding that can be a big impediment to attendance. This is particularly true for college students. We are particularly interested to get feedback from students about what kinds of webinars they would be interested in attending.

The scheduling flexibilities of webinars will allow us to focus on applying for graduate schools, preparing for conferences, and other topics that would be more useful earlier in the year than the conference allows. The APTC will be working with the Student Subcommittee of the APTC to develop student-oriented opportunities.

Getting the Ball Rolling

If you have an idea about a topic, you can e-mail me at cdrexler@uark.edu, tweet me (@cgdrexler), or stick an idea in the comments section.

If you’d like to host a webinar at some point in the future, send me a note and I’ll get you an invite to our first webinar on July 17, from 2-3 pm (Eastern). This inaugural webinar will focus on… webinars! We’ll focus on topic ideas, get some background on content development, and discuss the use of the technology. Drop me a line if you want to participate!

Acknowledgements

Amber Graft-Weiss and Terry Brock contributed to a lively Twitter discussion on this topic that helped develop and refine where we would like the webinars to focus. Shelley Keith, of Southern Arkansas University, advised on materials related to webinar content development.

The online abstract submission process will be opening on May 1. This JUST leaves you enough time to download the SHA Québec 2014 poster from the conference web site to inform you colleagues, friends and, of particular interest to this blog posting, your students of the upcoming conference. So, if you are a student, it’s time to start planning your participation in the 2014 conference. The conference theme, Questions that Count, is of particular interest to you as you will be living and working through these questions. It’s an excellent opportunity to participate in the definition of your future!

The Society for Historical Archaeology and the Advisory Council for Underwater Archaeology can help you to participate in the conference. Start preparing your request for financial support through one of the many programs available from the. Full information, including application forms, is available on the conference web page.

The ACUA offers a Travel Award for students coming from outside the conference country. SHA past-president Ed Jelks and his wife have very generously created the Ed and Judy Jelks Student Travel Awards, two amounts of $500 that will surely go a long way to bring you a long way.

Et si vous êtes un étudiant francophone, ne manquez pas l’opportunité que vous offre la Bourse de Québec car la SHA souhaite encourager la participation d’étudiants ou d’étudiantes faisant leurs études en français.

Though not a travel award, the SHA Student Paper Prize is a very prestigious honor. The prize will be awarded to a student, or students, whose written version of a conference paper is judged superior in the areas of originality, research merit, clarity of presentation, professionalism, and of potential relevance to a considerable segment of the archaeological community. One prize will be awarded: The winning author will receive a book prize consisting of titles donated by the many presses and organizations exhibiting in the SHA Conference Book Room (totaling almost $1,500 worth of items in 2013) and a letter of recognition from the SHA President. The winning author will be encouraged to submit his or her paper to be reviewed for possible publication in Historical Archaeology. The results of the competition will be communicated to the entrants prior to the meeting and the winner will be announced at the annual business meeting.

Keep abreast of new opportunities and information concerning volunteer opportunities throughout the year on our website. The Student Subcommittee of the Academic and Professional Training Committee will certainly have further information on other activities organized by and for students. Follow their blog posts as well!

Since enrolling in graduate school, I’ve encountered and created great opportunities to become an active public archaeologist. Using these experiences and the accumulated insights, I hope to encourage others, whether students, professors, professionals, avocational archaeologists, or individuals working in other fields, to incorporate these ideas into forthcoming plans, to reflect upon their own experiences, and to share their insights with others.

Be (pro)active and involved

This point is the master key to all public archaeology doors. All the suggestions listed below stem from this concept. Creating and promoting your presence in any archaeological community provides new opportunities and might inspire new ways of thinking.

Be inventive and encourage creativity

Don’t pressure yourself into making every idea novel, unique, or outstanding, but don’t hesitate to adapt something that already exists to meet your needs.

UWF’s Graduate Anthropology Association (GAA) wanted to celebrate bioanthropology and cultural anthropology in a way similar to National Archaeology Day. Simple research led the group to realize that no such days, weeks, or events exist nationally. What’s a group to do? Create a day for each! GAA will host two public events on the UWF campus. Bioanthropology Day occurred on February 12, Charles Darwin’s birthday. Cultural Anthropology Day will take place on April 9 in honor of Bronislaw Malinowski’s birthday.

Actively seek inspiration and search for it in multiple locations

Engaging with others interested in public archaeology facilitates ingenuity. Read a lot of everything—books, articles, newspapers, tweets, blog posts. Explore conferences or professionals not involved with archaeology. Study effective programs, training sessions, workshops, educational tactics, outreach approaches, and ideas in other disciplines and work toward integrating new inspirations into your repertoire.

A basic example: I recently became editor of the Florida Anthropological Society’s (FAS) quarterly newsletter. FAS hoped to introduce color into the newsletter and, over time, introduce new content. How did I implement changes? I looked at newsletter formats that I already liked (and didn’t like). I used Google to find other newsletters to see what works and what doesn’t. I diligently considered color schemes and asked for others input and criticisms.

Use social media and network

Twitter, Flickr, Reddit, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, blog forums and all the others—each of these sites has remarkable purpose and promise for public archaeologists. Whether used personally or professionally, these sites can serve as essential resources, forms of entertainment, providers of knowledge and inspiration, networking enablers, and modes of outreach.

Consider your interests and the need of the organization/community/public

If you’re interested in planning or formulating some type of outreach event, start with ideas, topics, or persons that attract you. From there, it becomes easier to develop an idea.

For example, I encouraged the Anthropology Department at the University of West Florida to participate in the AIA’s National Archaeology Day this year. My interest in public archaeology encouraged me to plan the event, but Governor Rick Scott’s anti-anthropology/pro-STEM remarks directed me toward its theme (the Science of Archaeology) and purpose (to demonstrate how science is and can be applied in the discipline).

Ask questions and challenge the status quo

If you have an idea, explore it! Embrace creativity and don’t refrain from asking for others’ insight, feedback, or permission. Asking questions can lead to ongoing dialogue or a more rewarding outcome.

Talk to peers or colleagues about their experiences

Engaging those around you in these discussions can provide inspiration and promote creativity. These conversations might enable you to adapt past ideas or practices into present or forthcoming plans and activities.

UWF, the City of Pensacola Code Enforcement office, and the Escambia County Property Appraisers, along with volunteers from the community, recently completed a clean-up at Magnolia Cemetery. This partnership, the immensely successful clean-up, and future plans for the cemetery, however, emerged from a conversation I had with a fellow graduate student. Although his experiences applied to different aspects of cemetery studies, his project piqued my curiosity and I began to ask professors questions and to develop, with the assistance of many, an outreach tactic designed to improve the appearance of neglected cemetery and, more importantly, encourage community dialogue regarding the state of Magnolia Cemetery in the present and in the future.

Develop a community of like-minded individuals

Whether accessible in person or via the web, such a community provides much of what has been discussed already: inspiration, ideas, novelty, constructive criticism, advice and other forms of feedback. Seek support and be supportive of others.

A note for for students: Apathy is your worst enemy!

• Read your e-mails on a regular basis
• Respond to e-mails on a regular basis
• Join organizations, both professional and within your community
• Attend conferences, network, and present
• Join organizational committees
• Volunteer
• Avoid excuses
• Never permit yourself to rely on the “I’m too busy” or “I’ll be too busy” mentality; though it may be true, it’s true for everyone and it will not change.

Do you work with or engage the public in some capacity? If so, what insight(s) would you impart to others?

Globalisation, Immigration, Transformation: the 2013 Plenary Session
(Wednesday January 9^th 6-8pm)

Students arriving in Leicester for the opening day of the conference will find the Plenary Session a place where SHA membership comes together across research interests and affiliations. The session panel will focus on case studies and moderators will facilitate a broad exploration of the conference themes.

Navigating the Field: Education and Employment in a Changing Job Market
(Thursday January 10^th 8:30-10:30)

Cosponsored by the APTC Student Subcommittee and ACUA, this session is Part I of II and will focus specifically on student concerns. Panelists from both underwater and terrestrial backgrounds will address what is arguably the most pressing issue on many students’ minds—jobs.  Whether you seek a job in the United States, Europe or elsewhere, panelists will offer their perspective on how education matches up with the changing job market.

Past Presidents’ Student Reception
(Thursday, January 10^th, 4:30pm- 6:00pm)

Students are invited to join SHA past presidents for an informal reception. This is a great opportunity to connect with leaders in the organization. A free drink and snacks will be provided.

Equity (Issues) for All, Historical Archaeology as a Profession in the 21st Century
(Friday January 11^th 9-12:30)

Part II of these sessions on professional issues, this symposium will address concerns of gumptious academic and cultural resource management archaeologists. Senior managers and tenured professors from across the US and UK comprise the panel.  This will be an opportunity to engage upper management and tenured faculty in discussions of how to address current equity issues in the workplace, the barriers they faced rising in the ranks, and how they got to where they are today.

SHA Business Meeting
(Friday January 11th 5-6pm)

The SHA Business Meeting will be open to all members, students included. The organization welcomes and encourages student participation.

Academic and Professional Training Committee (APTC) Student Subcommittee (SSC) Meeting
(Saturday January 12^th 12:30-1:30)

The Academic and Professional Training Committee’s Student Subcommittee is run by and focused on SHA student members. As a formal platform for the interests and voices of students, it is a great way for them to contribute, develop professional skills and increase visibility. The SSC provides opportunities for students to participate in the organization at a variety of commitment levels.  Committee members organize sessions, are student liaisons to other committees, and contribute to the blog and newsletter. During the meeting, students will learn about ongoing  activities and have the chance to get involved.  Students participating in the SSC drive activities for the upcoming year and develop new projects. (Please note the midday time slot.)

Rap Session for Student Members
(Saturday January 12 1:30-5pm)

Sponsored by the Student Subcommittee, the informal format of the RAP session will allow students to hang out and discuss issues of import to them. Panelists are archaeologists at all stages in their career, both underwater and terrestrial. The popularity of this session grows each year and will be a great way to sum up any conference experience.

If you are a student attending the annual meeting in Leicester, please email the SSC chair, Jenna Coplin. If you cannot attend the committee meeting, but are interested in learning more about the SSC or keeping up with SSC goings-on throughout the year, email Jenna to be added to the student list serv. Also, be sure to follow the hashtag #SSC on Twitter throughout the conference (along with the #SHA2013 tag!) for student-specific tweets and messages!

In addition to these sessions, check out Emma Dwyer’s blog post about trips and tours of Leicester offered through the SHA.

Call Your Mom

Or call an uncle or an old friend; it doesn’t matter. Just make sure it’s someone who knows nothing about your work (likely easy to find), and is willing to listen (possibly a bit harder). The questions they ask can help you hone in on things you might make clearer.

Elevator

The elevator doors shut and you have until they open again to describe your project or research interests in a compelling way. This exercise helps you to eliminate unnecessary details and focus on the interesting parts.

Teach…. anyone

Many teach as adjuncts in anthropology departments. Few things will improve your communication skills quicker. However, not everyone is in the position to teach courses. Speak to your local schoolteachers, they often welcome presentations, and students can ask challenging questions. Adult education programs may also welcome a guest speaker. These opportunities force you to organize materials, think about your audience and do not require a semester of your time.

Go to the Library (or local historical society)

Libraries and historical societies commonly have programs that invite guest speakers. These presentations can be great opportunities to present preliminary work. Those in attendance can encourage you to think on your feet.

Grab a Cup of Coffee

Make plans to meet with classmates and take turns presenting problems you are encountering. This is practice both for asking productive questions and fielding them.

Department Get-Togethers

Many departments offer students the opportunity to present work. This is a great way to get feedback on a work in progress at any stage. If your department does not do this, it is easy enough to organize. All you need is the approval from the Chair and a student listserv.

Talk to Yourself

Many people are hesitant to throw themselves in front of a crowd. With today’s technology a bit of self-critique is easy to do. Record yourself and watch it later. Audio is good but video might be better; you never know what odd gestures you might make unconsciously.

No pressure

It’s summer. As the mercury slides up the thermometer (WAY up the thermometer),  several events in the archaeological yearly round appear on the horizon. A host of field schools are in full swing around the globe, anxious graduate students are working to complete fieldwork before returning to the classroom, and there is the usual crop of CRM projects that tax the sweat glands and keep sports drink companies in the black.

For those of us exploring the academic job market, this also means that a new round of position announcements lies on the horizon. For each position, a lucky few candidates will get invited to a campus visit, which will entail a job talk.

The job talk can be an intimidating, highly daunting experience. This post is intended to offer some basic guidance that may assist the prospective with preparing for this talk. I draw upon some printed and electronic sources (there frankly aren’t many available on this subject) as well as some interviews with several scholars who have gone through this process recently and met with success.

Do Your Homework

It should come as no surprise that there is a lot of planning involved in the job talk. Think about who is going to be in the room. If you will be presenting at a large university with a graduate program, you can expect faculty, graduate students, and some upper-division undergraduates. With many departmental web pages now carrying faculty photographs, it’s not a bad idea to be able to identify the faculty on sight, which can help you anticipate queries during the Q and A after the talk and anticipate some of the questions that might be posed to you.

In most departments, the attendees are likely to be at least conversant in the elements of archaeology, though may not be as familiar with historical archaeology, and almost certainly not with your particular focus within historical archaeology, so be prepared to walk them along to the point that you can convey the import of your work. James Davidson, of the University of Florida, suggests that avoiding excessive particularlism can help the candidate show how well-rounded he or she is.

Anna Agbe-Davies (University of North Carolina) points out that as historical archaeologists, we straddle a lot of disciplines, meaning that we might wind up teaching in anthropology, history, or American studies departments, each of which will be more or less familiar with your discipline. It is possible that 75% of the audience may have no meaningful understanding of archaeology, and would therefore need more background than a department crammed full of diggers.

If you don’t do this well, you can expect to get questions on the technical aspects of the work only, and you likely lose the chance to have a substantive discussion of what you just presented. You also want to avoid coming off as interested in an arcane corner of the scholarly world. It’s easy to forget how niche your work is when you’re writing the dissertation. Showing the relevance of your work to larger trends in academic thought, within as well as outside of archaeology, is generally a good thing.

Time and Message Discipline: These are a Few of My Favorite Things

Most of the job talks I’ve attended were allocated an hour. You know what happens at the end of that hour, right? People start looking towards the door, ready to leave. If you talk right up to that hour mark, your audience won’t get to ask questions or will have to stay late, which won’t make you look good to a prospective employer.

Darley and Zannah (1986) suggest that it’s best to take about 75% of the allotted time for your talk. For an hour, this would be about 45 minutes, which is long enough to get to the meaty bits of your research, but not so long that you start unduly taxing people’s attention spans. This will leave a nice amount of room for questions, which there will be (see Practice, Practice, Practice, below). Be sure to check with the host institution before you start planning the talk to make sure you know long you have.

Also, keep on message (avoid ramblings and digressions) and keep an eye on the clock (wear a wristwatch in case there’s not a visible clock in the room). These kinds of discipline are crucial to show that you can organize your talk into a digestible, relatable way. Hit the high points.

The Army* encourages presentations (OK, briefings, but they’re basically the same thing) to consist of three major points, each supported by three subsidiary points. While that structure isn’t going to suit everyone, the idea behind that structure is to present the most crucial elements of the material in a fulsome, but necessarily limited manner, as you don’t have the time and your audience doesn’t have the attention span to ingest all the details of your work.

Technology

Let’s envision a scenario wherein you’re setting up for your job talk at Awesome State University (Go Fighting Crawfish!). You’ve spent the past week constructing what could be empirically verified as the greatest PowerPoint presentation in history. It interdigitates flawlessly with your job talk, the images and data tables tagging off brilliantly with the speech you’re about to give. The recording of the talk (it will probably be recorded) will play on a continuous loop in the Louvre next to the Mona Lisa.

You clear your throat, approach the podium, and you get through exactly five letters (“Welco…”) before a pop and hiss signifies the untimely demise of the bulb in the projector… that is affixed to the ceiling of the classroom… fifteen feet above the audience and reachable only by ladder. There’s no chance that bulb gets replaced anytime tonight, and you must now do your presentation without the aid of visuals (I would not advise trying to compensate by doing shadow puppets with a flashlight).

As you can see from my next slide… NOOOOOO!

We’ve all seen this kind of thing happen at conferences. Not so long ago, the slide projector might spit the carousel, or a slide would be in backwards. Nowadays, it might be that the available computer runs OpenOffice or something else not-PowerPoint, and the formatting goes haywire. We can laugh that off because a conference presentation is not a job talk.

This is. Buller (2010:21) observes that candidates can derail their chances for being offered a job by placing their faith in unreliable technology. Never assume that a certain kind of technology will be available, and be prepared for malfunctions. Always take several different formats of your presentation. At minimum, have a laptop with you that has your presentation deck saved on it. Carry additional copies on a flash drive and a CD/DVD (have cuneiform tablets gone out of style yet?). Get these together BEFORE you leave town for the campus visit, as you can’t rely on having the time to make the requisite copies.

I’ll include one other thing that cropped up recently with a colleague’s laptop as she started teaching a class here at Southern Arkansas University. Her brand-new laptop didn’t come with a VGA port. That’s the 15-hole connector on the side of most laptops. Since most folks never use the VGA port, the manufacturer left it out, requiring a special adapter (“dongle”) to add that functionality. Better to find that out before you get in the room to give your talk.

At the most extreme, be prepared to give your talk completely sans power/technology. Buller recommends carrying printouts of essential images or data tables to pass around, should the technology completely fail you. If everything goes smoothly and you don’t need them, they make useful handouts that you can pass along to interested parties at the close of the talk, or useful aids to those with failing eyesight who might have trouble seeing your presentation slides from the audience.

Practice, Practice, Practice (then Practice Some More… and between Practices, Work in Some Practice)

Darley and Zanna (1986) describe the job talk as essentially a performance. Like any play or musical, rehearsal breeds quality and coherence. Know the talk cold. Be able to present it in 16 different languages, and be able to present it backwards in at least 9. Have friends shoot you with paintballs at random while rehearsing so you can practice recovering should you be knocked off your rhythm.

Agbe-Davies suggests that, if you’re a graduate student, get your peer grads together to watch a dry run of your talk. Graduate students can be some of the harshest critics of your work, much more so than faculty, and their comments (politely phrased) can help you anticipate questions that could crop up at the actual job talk or point out shortcomings that you could revise into a subsequent draft of the talk.

Don’t Panic, and Always Carry a Towel

OK, not really. Well, do indeed refrain from panicking, but a towel is not necessary. See Adams (1979) for disambiguation.

If you haven’t sat through job talks at your own institution before, be warned that they can become somewhat tense. Resident faculty may ask some hard, sometimes harsh, questions of the candidate. This is not necessarily intended to expose the speaker’s shortcomings as a scholar, though it might. It could, rather, be a test of the speaker’s ability to carry on rigorous academic debate. One’s ability to match wits with the department’s faculty can significantly add to a candidate’s standing. Matt Liebmann, of Harvard University, encourages us to “NEVER apologize for your work,” and that one’s inclination, when challenged by established faculty, is to become apologetic for its shortcomings. “Deliver your talk with confidence and always stand up for yourself during the question and answer section” (Liebmann, personal communication).

But, don’t fret. You’re not going to anticipate EVERY question, and there is likely going to be something asked that you just don’t have an answer for. Admit that you don’t know, thank the questioner for providing new light on the subject, and write down the question. Whether you get the job or not, you have something to consider in your own scholarship in future. If you have a later job talk elsewhere, you have a chance to prepare for that question, should it come up again. It also shows that you’re engaged with the audience and having a professional discussion with them.

Do you have other thoughts or insights? Post them in the comments section.

Thanks to Dr. Anna Agbe-Davies (University of North Carolina), Dr. James Davidson (University of Florida), and Dr. Matthew Liebmann (Harvard University) for providing insight and reflections on their experience of this process. The above is my recalling and interpretation of their remarks, and I take full responsibility for any mischaracterizations, etc.

References

• Adams, Douglas
  • 1979     The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. New York: Harmony Books.
• Buller, Jeffrey L.
  • 2010     The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
• Darley, John M. and Mark P. Zanna
  • 1986     The Compleat Academic: A Career Guide. New York: Random House.

Large groups on a tight time frame often peered over a fence at us (or we would run over and give them a “quick explanation”), but more leisurely non-group tourists would stop by to see what we were doing. The students were encouraged to speak freely with the visitors and explain our research goals of pinpointing the location of the 1810 Meeting House and the 1812 Centre Family Dwelling, investigating their spatial relationships and the extent to which they lined up with one another and contributed to the sense of order at the village. As an instructor, I found it gratifying to hear the students seriously repeating to the visitors the very ideas I thought had been going right over their heads as I instructed. On the last day of the field school, Morgan, one of our students, was so affected by the experience that she applied for and has been accepted as a future interpreter at the Shaker village site. This was a first for me, and while it may be a loss for us in our stock of trained excavators, it was an unusual win for public archeology in the broader sense!

Our work this summer had another unexpected public component. Once we verified that the foundation of the 1812 Centre Family Dwelling House was fairly well intact not far from the present surface grade, we added a goal of completely exposing this foundation for permanent viewing. This was extra work (not a small task, the Dwelling House main block was 56.25 ft x 45 ft), since our initial research objective could have been met by just exposing and mapping the two front corners of the building, and then backfilling. But by exposing the full foundation, we hoped to give the visitors a better sense that Pleasant Hill had changed drastically over time, and that it had a dynamic history of experimentation as it developed.

Our two buildings sites readily presented this opportunity as they were oriented to a north-south road, an orientation that was abandoned just a few years after completion of the 1812 Centre Family Dwelling. Realignment of the main village 90 degrees to east-west entailed building a new Meeting House (in 1820) and a new Centre Family House (begun in 1824), both of which are standing today within viewshed of our sites, making their strong testimony to the change of orientation. Coupled with this was the fact that the foundation we were excavating was just yards from where most visitors entered the site, making it a unique opportunity to get them thinking about all those other buildings that used to be at Pleasant Hill. Work progressed well to expose the foundation, but we could soon see that the foundations stones were preserved at many different levels, some just below the present surface grade (established in the 1970s to smooth over an overwise rough building ruin), and others up to a foot below the present grade. These deeper areas created a potential hazard for falls, sprained ankles, etc (Shaker Village has overnight guests who do walk about at night) and an obstacle for lawn maintenance. As we pondered our dilemma, Shaker Village staff member Don Pelly came up with an idea — if we could gradually “feather” down the grade in most areas, starting about a foot and a half out from the foundation to gradually lower down to meet the intact foundation stones, the hazard and maintenance burden would be sufficiently reduced. We coined the term “archeolandscaping” to help ease the burden of this work; I think throwing our new term around helped boost our spirits for say, at least a couple of hours!! Several days of work was required but thanks to the students’ efforts, the 1812 Centre Family Dwelling foundation now has a good chance to remain exposed, working to enhance the visitor experience.

And finally, I was thinking that while these aspects of our experience were very important, still most important, especially as an influence in public archaeology, were the three days we left the Shaker site and journeyed a short distance to the Civil War site of Camp Nelson, in Jessamine County, Kentucky (www.campnelson.org) to assist archaeologist Dr. Stephen McBride in that site’s annual “School Days” program, where all the 5^th grade classes of Jessamine County come to Camp Nelson and watch or participate in various reenactor and hands-on history stations, including an archaeology station (often cited as one of the most popular by students and teachers). This year’s archaeology station was excavation at one of the Camp Nelson’s sutler stores. Normally the archaeology station is run by three to four archaeologists, but with the help of the 14 student field school we had a great teacher to student ratio. I was struck by the insightful comments our field school students wrote in their journals (required for the class) after the experience. Though many commented about how tiring it can be to work with large numbers of 5^th graders (who would not agree?), they also commented on how exciting it was to watch the amazement of the 5^th graders as they connected with material culture not touched by others for nearly 150 years.   Several commented on how important it was to give these young students a sense that history can be discovered in multiple ways, not just in books, to help them better understand the significance of their own local history, or to help them grasp the fragility of archaeological deposits. I was also struck by what a great job our students did in instructing on things like keeping unit floors flat or artifacts in place, even though they had only a couple weeks of experience behind them.

From our experience, it seems as if there is nothing to reinforce learning like being forced to instruct. Have you had similar experiences by exposing your field school students to public archaeology? What strategies do you use to teach your field school students about working with the public? What advantages and disadvantages come from doing public archaeology in a field school setting?

What kind of students and research win the award? Mullins concisely described the work of last year’s two recipients and we were curious to learn a little more about Corey McQuinn and Adrian Myers as students. We interviewed McQuinn and Myers and the following is a summary of their responses.

Corey McQuinn, a master’s student concentrating in Historical Archaeology at the University of Albany, researches enslavement in the Northeast, an understudied topic. He examines the Mabee Farm in Rotterdam, New York, and how different archaeological models of enslavement and racialization apply to the Northern context. Through another project focused on the Underground Railroad in Albany, New York, he studies how the construction of a community that supported the Underground Railroad relates to New York’s earlier history as a slave state and its continued economic dependence on enslaved labor corps.

McQuinn working with students at the Schoharie River Center archeological field school in Montgomery County, New York. Dragon site on the Schoharie Creek (2008).

In addition to this academic research, as a project manager for the cultural resource management firm Hartgen Archaeological Associates, Inc., McQuinn says he must be flexible and cover a broad range of time periods and historic contexts. He has worked in a variety of historical contexts, including cemetery excavations, tavern sites, Shaker village sites, farmsteads and industrial contexts. He has also helped to run Hartgren’s youth archaeological field school summer programs, getting students involved in community archaeology.

McQuinn and students screening at Stephen and Harriet Myers house youth field school in Albany, New York, last summer.

The Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award helped McQuinn attend his first SHA conference, where he presented a paper, met other professionals in his field, including authors of papers and books he has read. A highlight of the conference was getting to know people and learning about work in progress. He finds both the annual conference and quarterly newsletter valuable resources for identifying potential partnerships and opportunities in the future.

Though his three kids, Remember, Beatrix, and Jasper, are his greatest successes, McQuinn also received the New York Archaeological Association’s William Beauchamp Student Award in 1998 and the 1997-1998 Dana Student Internship Grant from Ithaca College. He is looking forward to completing his master’s thesis next semester and his PhD in the future.

Myers excavating at the PoW camp in Manitoba.

A PhD candidate at Stanford, Adrian Myers, learned of the Ed and Judy Jelks Travel Award through attending the SHA conference, SHA business meetings, and from the HISTARCH email listserv. The award enabled him to present a paper, “Dominant Narratives, Popular, Assumptions, and Radical Reversals in the Archaeology of German Prisoners of War in a Canadian National Park” in the session chaired by Michael Roller and Paul Shackel, “Reversing the Narrative.” The paper was about all the surprising and counterintuitive things he encountered while studying the history of Nazi soldiers in a prison camp in Canada during World War II. Long interested in the history of the Second World War, his dissertation research is a historical archaeological study of a prison camp in Manitoba, Canada. Over three seasons of work he and colleagues surveyed, mapped, and excavated portions of the camp. Myers also travelled to Germany and met with three men who had been prisoners of the camp.

Myers has participated in a variety of other projects, including the “Van Project” at the University of Bristol, the Stanford Gymnasium Dig, and Bonnie Clark’s field school at the Granada Relocation Center, a World War II Japanese internment camp in Colorado. He also used free Google Earth imagery to map the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, assembled and co-edited a book on archaeology and internment camps, did a study on 20th century porcelain electrical insulatorsand also manages to work part-time in CRM archaeology.

Myers interviewing German PoWs in Germany.

Also a recipient of the National Geographic Society Waitt Grant (2009), Myers suggests undergraduate students pursue ideas for projects, even if it seems impossible and incredibly far off, especially if they are passionate about the subject. He suggests finding a supportive graduate program and, with effort the research can probably be done. He also says having an awesome adviser helps.

Both McQuinn and Myers sound passionate about their research and actively pursue opportunities to participate in projects and make connections with their peers in historical archaeology. They recognize the SHA as a resource for students and advise them to participate in the organization by speaking or corresponding with other archaeologists and presenting at conferences. The Academic and Professional Training Student Subcommittee (SSC) is starting a group discussion on student professionalism and the Society for Historical Archaeology. Please become a member of the conversation by joining the SSC Yahoo! group. Email your request to JCoplin@gc.cuny.edu and include your email to join.

We look forward to hearing from you!

To be considered for the prize, candidates must be a standing member of the SHA, be registered in a French-language university and preparing a thesis or a dissertation in French and they must present a substantive or theoretical paper at the annual meeting.

To apply, submit a letter including a confidential letter of reference from your research director, a copy of your pre-registration at the annual meeting, a 500-word abstract of the proposed paper and a copy of your resume to the Quebec City Award Secretary by June 30. Further information is available from the Quebec City Award Secretary at the following address: William Moss, Archéologue principal, Hôtel de Ville, C.P. 700 Haute-Ville, Québec (Québec), Canada G1R 4S9. Telephone: 418.641.6411 ext, 2149; Fax 418.641.6455; email: william.moss@ville.quebec.qc.ca. Please visit the Society for Historical Archaeology web site for full information. 

Bourse de Québec

Le Bourse de Québec est accordée afin de promouvoir la participation d’étudiants de langue française au colloque annuel et aux activités de la Society for Historical Archaeology. La bourse correspond au montant des intérêts accumulés sur le capital initial dans le courant de l’année, le tout n’excédant pas $750.

Pour être éligible, le candidat doit être membre en règle de la SHA, être inscrit dans une université francophone et y préparer une thèse ou un mémoire en français. Enfin, il doit présenter, dans le cadre du colloque annuel de la SHA, une communication substantielle ou théorique.

Pour poser votre candidature, faites parvenir une lettre au secrétaire du comité de la Bourse de Québec. Cette lettre doit être accompagnée des documents suivants : une lettre de recommandation confidentielle de votre directeur de recherche, une preuve d’inscription à l’université, une copie de votre inscription préliminaire au colloque annuel, un résumé de votre communication (maximum de 500 mots) et une copie de votre curriculum vitae. Pour de plus amples renseignements, veuillez contacter le secrétaire du comité de la Bourse de Québec à l’adresse suivante : William Moss, Archéologue principal, Hôtel de Ville, C.P. 700 Haute-Ville, Québec (Québec), Canada G1R 4S9. Téléphone: 418.641.6411, poste 2149; Télécopie 418.641.6455; courriel: william.moss@ville.quebec.qc.ca. De plus amples renseignements sont disponibles sur la page web de la Society for Historical Archaeology.