Public Archaeology Notes assembles information and resources from a variety of sources. Each issue showcases a few of the many organizations, programs, projects, publications, media, social media, and other resources to help archaeologists reach out to networks and communities and help non-archaeologists learn about and participate in our work. Each issue of Notes will use this general template. From time to time, we may add, or delete, a Spotlight.

Congratulations to the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) for ten years of extraordinary public archaeology work that has inspired so many of us in this last decade. If you don't know FPAN, its "mission is to promote and facilitate the conservation, study, and public understanding of Florida's archaeological heritage through eight regional centers." Each region has its own website. I'll never forget the day some years ago that I first met the dynamic FPAN folks at an SAA Annual Meeting passing out luggage tags(!) and interesting pamphlets in the huge Exhibit Hall. FPAN inspires us to do more, strive more, and find and develop those creative collaborations that help achieve the impossible. Thank you, FPAN, for being a role-model for many of us. 

Preservation 50 celebrates 50 years of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), perhaps the most significant piece of legislation to protect 13,000 years of America's heritage. Read about MAPP, a great outcome of the Preservation50 initiative, below in Spotlight: YouTube & VIMEO. Follow Preservation50 on Facebook and on Twitter @preservation50.

2015 was a big year for Project Archaeology (PA). PA celebrated its 25^th Anniversary, published new curricula, and reached many teachers and students with its message of preserving our shared heritage. Read about PA's accomplishments this year and plans for the next 25 years in the Project Archaeology 2015 Annual Report. If you haven't spent a full hour browsing the Project Archaeology website for ideas and inspiration, put it on your "do-it-soon" list!

Save the Date! International Archaeology Day 2016 is on October 15th. The Archaeological Institute of America actively seeks partners to host events and join in as supporting organizations to celebrate International Archaeology Day throughout the month of October.  Last year over 400 groups hosted more than 500 events in 27 countries.  Events ranged from school essay contests, to site tours, to archaeology fairs, and everything in between!   Learn more about becoming a Collaborating Organization or submit your event now. 

 

Project Archaeology (PA) presents the National Archaeology Educator’s Conference 2016 Back to Basics: Education 101 for Archaeologists & Archaeology 101 for Educators at Historic Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 10 – 14, 2016. PA invites all archaeology educators including archaeologists, museum educators, teachers, students, and anyone interested in archaeology education to attend! The conference provides professional development through sessions, workshops, and field trips; presents opportunities for networking and mentorships; and connects conference attendees with high-quality educational materials. $249 early-bird rate if you register by July 15, 2016. Please share with your educators network!

In 2014, Project Archaeology created a free, downloadable curriculum guide focused on the 12,600 year old burial of a two- year- old child, known as the Anzick boy: Investigating the First Peoples, the Clovis Child Burial: A Curriculum Guide for Grades 8 - 12. This guide "includes texts by and about American Indians, supports Common Core State Standards, and integrates Indian Education For All Understandings. The guide is a perfect first unit for United States History (Grades 8-12) with two lessons and a final performance of understanding. Students will read current news reports, write an Archaeology Discovery Report, debate ethics of studying ancient human remains, write a persuasive essay, and join students from across the nation in creating memorials to the Clovis Child. Included in the resource section is a collection of relevant news articles on this amazing discovery in an easy to print and distribute newspaper, Clovis Chronicle. Thank you to Project Archaeology for this important, free educational resource that can be used in every state.

The Montpelier (Virginia! Not Vermont!....) Archaeology Department is excited to announce a partnership with Archaeology in the Community to offer a week long Archaeology Expedition for teachers! From July 24 - July 29, this program will give teachers experience working at a real archaeology site, and learning from experts on how to take what they've learned and apply it to the classroom. Archaeology in the Community is also offering scholarships to cover the programmatic expenses! Apply here!  Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
 
The South Carolina Archaeology Public Outreach Division Inc. (SCAPOD), a non-profit organization dedicated to "Preserving Heritage through Archaeology Education," offers an excellent array of lesson plans and inter-active archaeology programs for students of all ages. Check out these great resources!

The 2016 American Institute of Archaeology (AIA) Educators Conference Summary is now available. On January 9, 2016, about 20 people gathered in San Francisco for the second AIA Educator’s Conference. The daylong event built on last year’s conference in New Orleans. The program focused on two main topics: professionalization of heritage outreach efforts, especially in terms of generating research and data; and on creating a statement of ethics for these activities. A portion of the program was also devoted to following up on the calls to action that had been made in the 2015 meeting. 

The Kentucky Archaeological Survey and the Davis Bottom History Preservation Project recently launched on-line resource of innovative lessons, "Teaching Through Documentary Art: Lessons for Elementary and Middle School Social Studies Teachers." This wonderfully creative educational initiative is linked to two murals featured in the award-winning documentary Davis Bottom, Rare History, Valuable Lives. Developed with Kentucky teachers in mind, the 11 stand-alone lesson sets engage 4th through 8th-grade students in social studies while strengthening their visual, literacy, and analytical thinking skills. Each set consists of a short background essay, standards-based discussion questions, a list of achieved standards, and suggestions for teaching and activities. Davis Bottom in the 1890s is a portrait of a working class neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky at the turn of the last century. Davis Bottom was one of the city’s first integrated neighborhoods. Learning about the lives of these late 20th century people gives students the opportunity to explore the meaning of neighborhood and the definition of family, the use and abuse of power, and stereotypes about the working poor. Six lesson sets, targeting upper elementary school students (grades 4-5) are linked to this mural. Civil Rights in Lexington – 4th of July 1867 recreates the scene of one of Kentucky’s largest civil rights events. William “Willard” Davis, the man responsible for establishing Davis Bottom as an integrated community, was among the speakers that day. Learning about this event helps students understand the situation of newly freed African Americans after the Civil War and the beginnings of their long struggle for civil rights. Five lesson sets targeting middle school students (grades 6-8) are linked to this mural. Maybe a future phase would consider incorporating archaeological collections relating to the periods of study into these lessons.

The Canadian Museum of History uses objects and archival materials in their vast collection to teach about Canada's Native peoples. There's a lot of well-done, inter-active opportunities in this website to learn about geographies and the Native people within them.  Every Object Has Its History: the Northwest Coast, for Grade Levels 3 -8, informs students about the role of museums and, through analysis of artifacts and other material culture, helps students, "learn more about traditional daily life for First Peoples of the Northwest Coast, including aspects such as lodging, transportation, tools, clothing and food."

The first videos from the Making Archaeology Public Project (MAPP) are out and available for free downloading on VIMEO (it's not all about YouTube...)! They are marvelous education and outreach resources. I just watched the State of Georgia's beautifully done video on the Avondale Burial Site and was moved to tears. If you are not familiar with MAPP, this initiative celebrates the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHAP) 50 years ago, in 1966, through a video series showcasing 50 years of archaeology under the NHPA. As you know, the NHPA Act transformed archaeology in this country. "All of the archaeological work that is carried out to meet the requirements of the NHPA creates a vast reservoir of understanding about life in the past and yields a wealth of amazing stories about our American experience. The videos on this website have been created by volunteer groups of archaeologists from across the country in order to share some of these stories with you."  More videos will be added from other states over time! The MAPP website includes a whole array of K-12 educational resources. 
 
If you ever find yourself wanting to watch, or show, a video about real archaeological research, check the Recording Archaeology channel on Youtube. There's a dizzying array of topics and conferences covered!

Blogging is one of many tools to reach out to our diverse networks and share information and stories. Every one of us should consider blogging on a personal site, an organization's blog, or on a "community" blog, such as MAPA (Master of Arts in Public Archaeology at Binghamton University). MAPA bloggers are grad students at Binghamton and they offer thoughtful, interesting ideas and commentaries relating to various facets of public archaeology, CRM, and other topics.
 
I hope all you CRMers (and others too) know about Tom King's CRM Plus blog. Now that he's an elder and "retired" (from the federal government, at least) Tom writes on any topic that catches his fancy. But it's always fun and informative. Spend some time wandering in his archives if you are bored.
 

Montpelier (Virginia) Archaeology Program's Dig at Montpelier! shares research results and photos. By using the #keywords at the end of the posting, they tag other Instagramers that follow those keywords (i.e. #archaeology, #historicalarchaeology, #sitesof slavery, etc.). “These two groups of brown transfer-printed whiteware, though the same design and probably from the same vessel, were excavated 15 years apart and from two different areas of the South Yard! The full excavation of the South Yard is allowing us to reevaluate the artifacts found during the 1990s excavations and find cross area mends of vessels. #archaeology #historicalarchaeology #digva #historichomes #history #sitesofslavery #ceramics #labwork #transferprinted #transferwarecollectorsclub”

As noted in Public Archaeology Notes Issue #1, Twitter is a very useful social media tool to inform your network, community, friends, and the world about breaking (or old) news, events and programs, opinions, issues, and anything else people want to "tweet" about.  Like any social media, people can like it, share it, comment on it, save it, forget about it, and do other inter-active things with it.  

Tumblr is wonderfully flexible since you can use it as a mini-blog, or just post photos, or (less interestingly....) just promote events and programs. The Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) covers all its bases with a Tumblr page for many of its eight regional offices.  FPAN's Northeast's Tumblr page nicely illustrates use of Tumblr. And, like all social media, one can share, "heart," and comment on the post. Another good Tumblr example from that area is the Florida Anthropological Society's page, in which Florida Anthropology colaborators post lots of interesting mini-blogs and photos.
 
Like Twitter, Tumblr posts use keyword hashtags (#) to link a particular post to other tweets with identical keywords. 

Repeat from Public Archaeology Notes # 1: An important feature of the various social media above is that they are all intertwined. From one you can instantly post to another to maximize your message. You can shoot out postings, tweets, photos, and messages during an event or in between meetings. While some may see social media as a huge waste of time, many of us use social media as a very powerful education and community-outreach tool. Don't be afraid to get out there and use these tools! Perhaps your organization won't let you use social media as part of your work. First, ask, "why not?" and see if you can accommodate management's or IT's concerns. Show them some of the great examples in these Notes. If all else fails, register on these sites as yourself and create your own personal profile. Then go ahead and do your archaeology postings when you get home at night or on weekends under your own name. Let us know if you are having issues and we can brainstorm ideas with you!