Abstract
Digital tools and techniques have revolutionized archaeological research and allow analyses unimagined by previous generations of scholars. However, digital archaeological data appear to be an underappreciated resource for teaching. Here, the authors draw on their experiences as university instructors using digital data contained in the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org) to teach in a variety of higher education settings, from method-intensive thematic courses for graduate students to general education science courses for undergraduates. The authors provide concrete examples of how they use digital archaeological data to accomplish a range of pedagogical goals. These include teaching basic artifact identification and simple statistical methods as well as developing skills in critical thinking, inference from data, and problem solving and communication. The paper concludes with a discussion of how archaeologists can use digital data to address ethical and curricular issues, such as preservation, professional training, and public accountability that are crucial to the discipline and relevant to the academy at large.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 837-861 |
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 1 2014 |
Funding
Based at Monticello and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, DAACS facilitates comparative archaeological research into the social and economic dynamics that shaped slave societies and the African-American experience in the Atlantic world during the colonial and ante-bellum periods. It does so by providing free access to standardized, comparable archaeological data from 55 domestic sites occupied by the enslaved residents of 23 plantations located in Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Tennessee, Jamaica, Nevis, and St. Kitts (Fig. 2). The project is a collaborative venture between Monticello and over 25 other archaeological institutions, which worked together to develop the data structures and classification and measurement protocols instantiated in the archive.3
Keywords
- African diaspora
- Digital data
- Ethics
- Historical archaeology
- Pedagogy
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Archaeology
- Archaeology
