The University of Illinois
Field School in Archaeology
 

COURSE STRUCTURE
The field school provides training in the techniques of excavation, mapping, controlled surface surveys, plane surveying, artifact classification and contextual interpretation. Students will work individually and in supervised teams. Students learn to function as members of a field crew, with all of the skills necessary for becoming professional archaeologists. Several students from past field schools have gone onto graduate study and professional field-archaeology positions. Fieldwork in Illinois is labor-intensive and performed under hot, humid, and occasionally rainy and muddy conditions. Laboratory processing and analysis will be ongoing throughout the summer field season. Evening lectures by project staff and by visiting archaeologists and historians working in the area will be a regular part of the weekly schedule, with a focus on providing background on how field data are used to answer archaeological research questions. Students will be immersed in Cahokian and “American Bottom” archaeology and there will be several scheduled day trips to Fort de Chartres, Pierre Menard home, Fort Kaskaskia, Mastodon State Park, and more. Special events planned this year include (1) a long-distance trip to the St. Francois Mountains (in the Ozarks) that will entail camping over a weekend, and (2) a weekend experimental archaeology class.


COURSE GRADE AND TEXT BOOKS
Students will be evaluated on the basis of their active participation in and performance-quality related to specific field and laboratory tasks, excavation notes, discussion sessions, and an end-of-class archaeological experiment (axe-making, flintknapping, or pottery making) to be presented orally (probably during the camping trip). The course texts include selected outside readings and two books: Field Methods in Archaeology (FMA, 7th Edition) by T. Hester, H. Shafer, and K. Feder (Mayfield Pub. Co.) and The Archaeological Process (TAP), by I. Hodder (Blackwell Press).

 
LOCATION AND ACCOMMODATIONS

The eight weeks will be split between Cahokia and Washausen/Pieper. Students will be housed in a rental house near the Washausen/Pieper site (location to be decided, early April). The field school instructor is Dr. Timothy R. Pauketat, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois. He has over 20 years of experience in the archaeology of the Mississippi valley, and has directed multi-year excavations at and around Cahokia throughout the 1990s and early 2000s (i.e., the Early Cahokia Project, Richland Archaeological Project, and Cahokia Outpost Project).

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COURSE CREDIT, COSTS, AND TRANSPORTATION
The field school is open to undergraduates and graduate students of the University of Illinois and others (direct special inquiries to pauketat@uiuc.edu ). Students must register for both ANTH 354 and 355 (3 hours or 1 unit each), totaling 6 hours of undergraduate credit or 2 units of graduate credit (questions regarding registration should be directed to the Undergraduate Advisor, @ 244-3497, http://www.anthro.uiuc.edu/Department ). The cost of tuition for resident undergraduates will be approximately $1500. In addition, a housing/supplies fee of $350 pays for the rental house, speaker fees, and experimental archaeology class fees. This fee must be paid in advance via personal check, payable to the “Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois.” While in the field, students will be responsible for paying for their own food expenses. Students will also be responsible for other living expenses and for their transportation to and from the field site on a daily basis. Carpooling and communal cooking is the norm.

APPLICATION PROCEDURES
Enrollment is limited and an application form is required in order to select among all applicants. Priority will be given to students with B or higher grade-point average who seek to continue in anthropology or a related field. Application forms are available on line through www.anthro.uiuc.edu/fieldschool/fieldapp.pdf . They may also be picked up from the Department of Anthropology's Undergraduate Advisor, 109 Davenport Hall, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801. Completed forms should be returned to Dr. Pauketat (Davenport Hall, Rm. 123 or lab Rm. 196) by March 19, 2004 (they may be faxed to Dr. Pauketat, fax# 217-244-3490). Students will be notified of acceptance via email no later than April 5, 2004. Subsequent to acceptance, there will be two mandatory pre-field meetings for University of Illinois students (t.b.a.).



FOR MORE INFORMATION!
For more information about Cahokia, click here:

http://medicine.wustl.edu/~mckinney/cahokia/archaeology.html

http://www.news.uiuc.edu/scitips/02/09cahokia.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1219/p14s01-stgn.html

 

*FOR PRE-FIELD PREPATORY READINGS:

check out chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 13 in CAHOKIA: DOMINATION AND IDEOLOGY IN THE MISSISSIPPIAN WORLD, T. Pauketat and T. Emerson, eds., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (paperback, 2001, $25 @ Amazon.com).

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Last modified: January 26, 2004