ARCE 130 Archaeology Field School Laboratory

The focus of research is on understanding everyday life on historic plantations with an emphasis on field excavation, mapping, and recording methods, artifact analysis, and archaeological sciences, including learning about stratigraphic analysis, archaeological chemistry, soil science, dating techniques, residue analysis, compositional analysis, paleobotany, faunal analysis, and other methods used in environmental archaeology and bioarchaeology. Students will learn scientific methods in a classroom setting at an archaeological field research site where they will contribute to systematic excavations and the analysis of artifacts and soil samples. They will also participate in field-based laboratories where they will learn to test hypotheses by measuring and evaluating materials, including shell, soils, bones, ceramics, and plant remains. Throughout the course, students will study environmental strategies and different forms of material expression over time.

Students learn archaeological excavation, survey, lab, and recording techniques required to execute field research in household and environmental archaeology. Field research and labs emphasize scientific approaches to materials analysis and human/environmental interactions. Lectures and discussions are based in part on the study of scientific research that is relevant to the human occupation history of West Tennessee. Students attend field and lab classes forty to fifty hours per week, with the bulk of that time spent doing on-site field research and lab work. Reading assignments, lectures, and discussion sessions cover both technical aspects of the scientific investigative process, and the underlying theoretical issues in the field of environmental archaeology. Weekends are spent completing reading assignments, and exploring sites of interest in the South.