What makes archaeology and ancient history and culture projects such effective teaching tools?
Students remember participating in hands-on activities much more than being told facts, and archaeology and history projects help past cultures come alive and reflect people’s lives in a memorable way. Lessons about past cultures should ideally reenact an event or re-create a process (such as painting a Greek vase or writing on clay), require mentally stepping back in time, and be as authentic as they can reasonably be. In contrast, archaeology lessons that directly teach about how archaeologists dig are terrific tools for interdisciplinary work and they accommodate multiple learning styles. Archaeologists must work carefully in teams, observe closely, record, draw, write, analyze, and reach reasonable conclusions–and then be willing to change their minds as new evidence emerges. Archaeology is the source of so much of our knowledge about the past, and yet so much evidence is missing or damaged that we do a lot of guessing in history. When students look directly at the evidence we hav
