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SALT Case Study:  Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology

Page history last edited by Helen 9 years, 9 months ago

Academic:  Dr Kasia Szpakowska

Librarians:

SALT Team:  Matthew Allen

 


 

An Introduction to Egyptian Archaeology is a compulsory second year module for all Egyptology students. The current teaching approach has been developed to take full advantage of having an on-site collection, housed in the Egypt Centre which is welcoming to the idea of undergraduates actually using, touching and studying objects.

 

The module centres around the concept of an object life cycle—from conception, purpose, production, the technologies used to create it, its intended use, latter transformation and reuse. Every aspect up to, and including, its display and reuse as a teaching tool today.

 

Students are encouraged and enabled to develop the tools and the skills they will need for their careers. They learn how to do Egyptology, rather than just learning about Egyptology. Discussions are had around issues such as how did the objects get out of Egypt ? Collected ? Looted ? Is it ethical to display mummy remains or sacred objects? The students are exposed to the actual world and the moral debates within which they will work.

 

The assessment of the module is a research project. Students go to the Egypt Centre and study an object in a small group - handling it, making drawings, taking photos, weighing it and discussing it. They look up examples of similar objects in online and paper catalogues of other collections and communicate with curators, learning through looking at parallels. They sometimes make reconstructions of the objects using authentic techniques that they have studied, thus performing experimental archaeology.

 

In addition to the final assessment, there are always a series of associated sub-assessments. As needs and weaknesses are observed in the students’ work, mini assessments are introduced to address them, often different for each cohort. Sometimes this may be an exercise in bibliography writing. Other years, maybe writing letters to auction houses asking for information, or just submitting samples of sections of the final project piece. The students inform and contribute to the assessment process.

 

The students then construct a group wiki for their work on the production of the object. The wiki is used partly to give exposure to web tools and also partly to make it available to the public. It gets students used to working with others in research.

 

The final project is an individual piece of work, which incorporates their own version of the group wiki. Issues surrounding plagiarism and collusion are raised and discussed relating to the group contribution and how this is handled when making real contributions to group published papers.

 

They also complete a peer review on their colleagues’ and their own contributions using WebPA from Loughborough University. The top final projects are displayed on the Egypt Centre website.

 

The students are guided through aspects which would otherwise be difficult to address. These range from appropriate ways to communicate with museums and curators to the correct sourcing of images for use, rather than just borrowing them from the internet.

 

Student feedback is actively sought at the end of the module and it has led to the refining and development of the process over the years the module has been running. Comments include:

 

“This has been my favourite module since starting University”

 

“Being able to handle the object was both interesting and extremely educational”

 

“It really widened my knowledge of what archaeologists can do”

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