Facts and skills: archaeology in teacher training

Abstract

Most archaeologists start with the premise that the more people who know about archaeology the better. When challenged to justify this premise they have a number of responses ranging from the conservative ‘to know more is to understand more’, or the conservational ‘to preserve our heritage’, to the enlightened self-interest of ‘public knowledge or interest means public spending’ and thus the preservation of the archaeologist as well as of the archaeological record. Whatever the justification there is no consensus about how to enable people to know more, let alone a general agreement about what should be known, given that all human activity in the past lies within the scope of archaeological enquiry. There is, however, an assumption that to be effective we should capture the interest of the young and therefore that knowledgeable teachers will produce a knowledgeable future public.