Archaeological Overlap

Any archaeological field school invariably draws in a cross section of students who are not directly working toward receiving a degree in archaeology. For a truly rounded education in the arts and sciences, students end up taking a cross-section of classes for a variety of reasons. A couple days ago when the slight 35 kilometer/hour breeze came to a lull at the Vigla Site in Cyprus (allowing the microphone to pick up the audio), I asked my team of undergraduate students brought in from Messiah College to think how undergraduate disciplinary training in non-archaeological fields might be applied to the archaeological process that they were doing right then and there.

I posed the question, and they had 15 minutes to think of a response. This is how it played out. I was very satisfied with the results, as the students worked with the data emerging from the field and excavation unit, and also explored how this influenced them personally (back in the day, we used to refer to this as building character).

The first is Danielle King, an education major…

The second is Carrie Bisciotti, a philosophy major, who discusses theories laid out by Dr. Robin Collins, and how these theories might be applied to thinking of evil as inherent to virtue-building processes (is Carrie suggesting that my trench supervisory skills were at first perceived as evil to her, but then looked at another way, perhaps as the anvil and hammer upon which virtue is built?)…

The third is David Crout, a history major who discusses epistemology, real-time…