Assessment

Field Journal

One of the most important aspects of any archaeological fieldwork is keeping a field journal. This is essentially a diary in which you record the day to day details of your fieldwork, from the sites you record or the features you excavate, right down to the weather and light conditions (which, believe it or not, can affect your ability to locate sites or identify artefacts), the names of the people who participate each day and any problems you encounter. It is also the place where you can record any impressions or interpretations of sites and features as they occur to you. This will be particularly important if you are one of many fieldworkers on a large project and your results are to be analyzed or written up by someone else, but it will also help to jog your memory later on when you come to write up your report. Your field journal will form an invaluable record of your fieldwork and, since you cannot predict what questions may interest future researchers, one day it may even provide new and unforeseen information. As a formal record of your fieldwork, another archaeologist should be able to reconstruct your field program and understand the reasoning behind your decisions just by reading your notes. Remember, the more information you record in your field journal the easier it will be for you or someone else to write up your results in the end. Don't trust your memory, write everything down.

Team Work

Working as a member of a team is a necessary skill for all archaeologists, but especially when doing fieldwork. However, this is a skill which needs to be learnt and practiced. Many of the fieldwork exercises in this topic will involve you working in a team with other students, both in day to day fieldwork activities, and for parts of your assessment.  Our assessment of your teamwork will not be confined to how you tackle field exercises but will also take into account your contribution to group assignment work.

Daily participation

Daily participation refers to the work each student completes on site and includes whatever tasks need to be completed each day, whether mapping, excavation, sieving, cataloguing artefacts, public outreach, photography, or completing field forms (e.g. context forms, feature forms, photo inventory, artifacts labels, etc).  Each student will be graded according to how well he/she follows standard archaeological field procedures and the attitude they adopt towards each task.

Interpretation assignment

Your interpretive assignment will be developed during and immediately following the field school.  Students are expected to work in groups to produce an interpretive pamphlet or poster about our work at the Repat.  I will have these printed, so they will be real materials that will be distributed to the community.  Because you are producing a real piece of interpretation you will need to plan it properly, although we will try and integrate the planning of this into the actual field school as much as possible. 

This is group work, so part of your planning will be to work together to produce the final interpretation.  You will also need to liaise with other groups to ensure that your information is complementary.

Subject areas
(Please note: you don’t have to use these titles in your finished product – they are simply to identify each option clearly). 
1.  Poster: ‘Archaeology at the Repat: the ARCH3303/8304 Field School’.
2.  Pamphlet: ‘Archaeology of the RGH Air Raid Shelters’.
3.  Pamphlet: ‘Archaeology of WWII in Adelaide’.
4.  Poster: ‘Historical archaeology: Archaeology in the community’
5.  If you have another idea for a great piece of interpretation linked to this field school, please feel free to contact me and we’ll negotiate.