Exercises Overview
Any of these can be chosen to provide active learning within or outside the classroom and ways of obtaining credit in the course beyond exams and participation in the classroom. They can often be done in groups or not, in written and/or oral form. Each can include a small portion on the problems encountered in doing the project, or how it might be modified for next time, as a way of evaluation of the idea. Each can include the individual experience and opinions of the student, so as to integrate the personal with the scholarly experience. For many of them, the student could keep a personal journal throughout the course of the project, either for self-edification or for turning in as part of the assignment (also see journal exercise).
Exercises Cautions
Only one or two of the exercises can really be done within a semester, since they do take time. I chose the websites evaluation and artifact caption projects to add to class participation and exams as class requirements. Students seem to like all the exercises, though field trips are always preferred (but much harder to schedule and accomplish; plus if they are not during class time they cannot have attendance required). Each class seems to do each exercise somewhat differently.
The student exercises are the following:
1. Instructor for a Day
2. Add to the Topic for the Day
3. Archaeology Websites Evaluation
4. Artifact Caption Exercise
5. Museum Display Critique
6. Cemetery Visit Field Trip
7. Your School Artifact Display
8. Garbology
9. Archaeology Lecture Critique
10. Ethnographer and Ethnoarchaeologist
11. Storytelling in Prehistory
12. Heritage Management
13. Local Societies or Avocational
Groups
14. Material Culture Journal
15. Media Archaeologists
16. Field Trip