Prototyping Exhibits
Hmmmm….
Occasionally a task comes along which seems simple enough in concept but gets oh so much more complicated once begun. Well, I’m currently working just such a task. We have an archaeology table where visitors can dig through sand and find objects related to different periods in the river’s history. There are some pretty cool artefacts including an obsidian tool and a piece of a blue and white chopstick. Visitors love digging and uncovering the artefacts but we’ve been struggling with how to effectively encourage visitors to connect what they’ve found to a specific historical event. We’ve tried a few different activities without much success. All our ideas seemed to swing between two extremes; visitors either had to work quite hard filling out a lengthy workbook or they didn’t have an opportunity to do much and were simply reading text panels.
Shannon and I have been brainstorming some new ideas and we are almost ready to test them out in the galleries. I’m excited about what we’ve come up with. Lynne, one of our volunteers, and I have been working on site summaries for archaeological sites along the Fraser, and this week I’ll be making the final adjustments to an improved timeline. The prototypes are scheduled to be installed at the end of the year. Once they are done, I’d love to hear what you think.
Fraser River Discovery Centre 
I’ve worked on a few archaeological dig simulations for college students and family groups. What we use to do was concentrate on the digging with no more paper work than taking some measuments and writing down a few observations to distinguish between archaeology and tresaure hunting. The important part was keeping the artifacts of a single layer together by putting them in the same bag. The visitors would then clean their artifacts with a tooth brush, identify them with a reference booklet and try to interpret them in lots to find out what activity (fishing, hunting, pottery making, flintknapping, war, cooking, leisure, etc.) could have taken place for each time period (Prehistoric, French, English, Modern). Of course, these associations were determined ahead of time by preparing sets of artifacts and levelling them in the boxes accordingly. The historical context required for this interpretation was presented in a short tour before the dig. The activity was about one hour for family groups. Minimal paperwork, realistic process and rewarding fun!
These are some great suggestions! In the summer and on special events, we do have interpreters in the galleries to facilitate activities. I’ll pass your ideas along to Shannon who coordinates our interpretive team. Thank you!
If you have the material, I also suggest including fragmented artifacts in your simulation. Reassembling a broken artifact can be alot of fun for young participants. For this purpose, we bought complete replicas and broke them into a reasonable number of pieces to create simple puzzles. As an archaeologist, I can’t resist the fun of putting things back together! If you need this type of material, let me know.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your comments! We do some simple re-fitting with terracotta plates for the young kids now, for a separate archaeology-themed birthday party. The kids love that! Most of the objects in the dig are pretty random. Hopefully one day we will plan to get objects that tell a more cohesive story of human history along the Fraser River. I’ll definitely get in touch if we need objects. The objects you made for us already are so great. The students love handling the gill net and salmon harpoon in our Aboriginal fishing education program. They are a huge hit!