Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Archaeology And The Public: Exploring Popular Misconceptions, Tamara Rakestraw, Amy Reynolds

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

To understand how the public views archaeology and uncover the sources of their perceptions, this paper summarizes the interviews of 58 Fayetteville area high school and college students from the Fall (2000). Using standard ethnographic techniques, including prepared questionnaires and open-ended conversation, we identified several trends in the public's perceptions of archaeology and have developed some hypotheses to account for them. As the Society for American Archaeology has only recently begun to understand, to better educate the general public about archaeology it is important to identify and understand the sources of these misconceptions. For more than a century, Hollywood, book …