Eligibility and Field School's components
We welcome physical anthropology and archaeology students, future practitioners of forensic sciences as well as any one interested in mortuary archaeology. The School's program is aimed at both graduates and undergraduates, those who have previous field experience as well as those who don't have any experience at all.
The major component of our School is fieldwork. Students spend at least 6 hours a day in the field learning burial excavation techniques and documentation methods. The site is basically being excavated by the students under a direction and supervision of our staff. The main goal of this approach is to provide you with a real, hands-on experience in recovery of skeletal and incinerated human remains. This is a practical, every day course in burial excavation techniques and we refer to it as to a „Fieldwork”. This component takes at least half of the Field School's time and taking into account various weather conditions in which we work and the character of the work itself it is often very physically demanding but on the other hand rewarding in terms of gained practical, know-how experience.
Another component is laboratory work. Students work in a lab in shifts on a daily basis under the supervision of our staff. Here you learn how to deal with the excavated bones and how to document them in the lab. In other words, after learning how to excavate bones, now you learn what to do with them and how to take care of them. It is a real job because lab activity depends on student's involvement and the lab is practically operated by the students. This is also a place when you learn and practice basic analysis of human remains. The subject of the analysis change depending on the bone material that is coming to the lab from the field on a daily basis. We refer to this laboratory course as „Labwork”.
The third component is formal and informal teaching. We refer to it as to „Osteology”. You can find more information about it in the Program and Osteology Syllabi included in the Info Packet 2010.
We also provide lectures that cover the history of the site, the history of Poland, as well as
issues in mortuary archaeology. We don't treat these as a separate course — it is just called the „Afternoon Teaching”. It sometimes happens that there are not too many of them because you may prefer to get some rest at the end of the day.
Students working for credits must participate in at least four weeks of the Project. Their work worth 6 credits will be evaluated upon the quality of daily performance at the site, osteology course grade and a personal fieldwork journal submitted after the dig. Details will be provided in the class syllabus.