Lifelong Learning and Archeological Field Schools

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

To boil down your argument: education requires the criticism of comfortable suppositions, and anthropology is unique in its ability to inculcate such self criticism. Get directly to this claim. The first four pages are not helpful: in my opinion, they can be reduced to a single introductory paragraph. Excise all that is not necessary to that end, including your dissatisfaction with neoliberalism's criticism of higher education (154-171). Give concrete examples of, among other items: "fabricated community" vs. genuine communities of practice (126-128). Craft a focused conclusion. Avoid repetition and reliance upon commonplace truths, and, if possible, elaborate upon the epistemological basis of your argument.

Author Response

To boil down your argument: education requires the criticism of comfortable suppositions, and anthropology is unique in its ability to inculcate such self criticism. Get directly to this claim. The first four pages are not helpful: in my opinion, they can be reduced to a single introductory paragraph. Excise all that is not necessary to that end, including your dissatisfaction with neoliberalism's criticism of higher education (154-171). Give concrete examples of, among other items: "fabricated community" vs. genuine communities of practice (126-128). Craft a focused conclusion. Avoid repetition and reliance upon commonplace truths, and, if possible, elaborate upon the epistemological basis of your argument.

We appreciate the reviewer's input. The article has been modified following their suggestions as follows:

We outline the epistemology on which our work, and the argument advanced, here are based (Introduction).

We have rewritten the next three sections to further advance the arguments made in the Introduction, attempting to streamline this presentation. We still feel that this background is important to set the arguments advanced in the paper within their broader conceptual context. We did not do this adequately in the earlier draft and appreciate the reviewer calling this problem to our attention.

References to neoliberalism have been excised; we agree, it was a distraction.

Similarly, the distinction between fabricated and genuine communities of practice did not add much to the argument. Perhaps they are topics to be addressed another day in another paper. References to them have been dropped.

We rewrote the Conclusion considerably, bringing back themes raised in the Introduction. Hopefully, this helps to reiterate the argument's salient points and advance them. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Main research question
This article seeks to answer the question of how archaeological field schools can become privileged environments for promoting lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and intercultural understanding among university students. The authors ask how participation in archaeological communities of practice transforms the way students learn, produce knowledge, and relate to others.
2. Originality and relevance
This study is relevant and fills a gap in the literature on archaeological pedagogy. Unlike studies that focused on teaching excavation techniques or field results, this study addresses the field school as a space for ethical, cognitive, and social development. Furthermore, it explicitly links situated learning theory to the teaching of archaeology, something that has not been extensively explored in teaching practice. This study is original because it integrates the concept of “learning as a social process” with many years of practical field experience.
3. Contribution to the subject area
The main contribution lies in the articulation between accumulated empirical experience (1983–2008) and a profound theoretical reflection on learning as a social practice. The authors demonstrate that field schools can be laboratories for critical thinking, self-knowledge, and intercultural empathy. Furthermore, they propose a model of holistic education that transcends technical instruction, representing a substantial contribution to archaeology fieldwork pedagogy.
4. Methodological observations and possible improvements
The methodology is eminently reflective and narrative, grounded in the professional experience of the authors. While this approach is valid, a more explicit description of the pedagogical design and learning objectives could strengthen the research. It is suggested the incorporation of systematic evidence, such as surveys, interviews, or longitudinal data on the programme's impact on students. A greater critical examination of the role of researchers as observers and participants in the educational process. These improvements increase the analytical validity and replicability of the proposed model.
5. Coherence of conclusions
The conclusions are consistent with the presented arguments and examples. The authors satisfactorily answer their central question by demonstrating how field experiences foster intellectual curiosity, self-criticism, and intercultural sensitivity. The final reflections on the need for communication between communities of practice and for ethical action in diverse contexts flow logically from the text’s body.
6. References
The references are relevant, current, and varied. They include classic sources (Bourdieu, Lave, and Wenger) and recent ones (Bradley & Kahn 2024; Farah et al. 2024), demonstrating an effort to situate the debate within a contemporary framework. However, to enrich the conceptual framework, the bibliography should be expanded with recent studies on critical pedagogies or contemporary approaches to experiential learning.
7. Tables and figures
The text contains only two maps (Figures 1 and 2) that illustrate an excavated dwelling’s geographical location and layout. They are clear and relevant and help to contextualise the described experiences.
However, it would be advisable to incorporate additional visual elements —such as diagrams of the pedagogical design or the proposed learning process— that help to better visualise the relationship between theory and practice.

In summary, this is a solid, reflective article that contributes significantly to the teaching of archaeology. Its strength lies in its critical approach and integration of educational theory and practice. With slight methodological adjustments and an expansion of the empirical base, the text would have a high potential impact on the discussion about university pedagogy and experiential learning.

Author Response

1. Main research question
This article seeks to answer the question of how archaeological field schools can become privileged environments for promoting lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and intercultural understanding among university students. The authors ask how participation in archaeological communities of practice transforms the way students learn, produce knowledge, and relate to others.
2. Originality and relevance
This study is relevant and fills a gap in the literature on archaeological pedagogy. Unlike studies that focused on teaching excavation techniques or field results, this study addresses the field school as a space for ethical, cognitive, and social development. Furthermore, it explicitly links situated learning theory to the teaching of archaeology, something that has not been extensively explored in teaching practice. This study is original because it integrates the concept of “learning as a social process” with many years of practical field experience.
3. Contribution to the subject area
The main contribution lies in the articulation between accumulated empirical experience (1983–2008) and a profound theoretical reflection on learning as a social practice. The authors demonstrate that field schools can be laboratories for critical thinking, self-knowledge, and intercultural empathy. Furthermore, they propose a model of holistic education that transcends technical instruction, representing a substantial contribution to archaeology fieldwork pedagogy.
4. Methodological observations and possible improvements
The methodology is eminently reflective and narrative, grounded in the professional experience of the authors. While this approach is valid, a more explicit description of the pedagogical design and learning objectives could strengthen the research. It is suggested the incorporation of systematic evidence, such as surveys, interviews, or longitudinal data on the programme's impact on students. A greater critical examination of the role of researchers as observers and participants in the educational process. These improvements increase the analytical validity and replicability of the proposed model.
5. Coherence of conclusions
The conclusions are consistent with the presented arguments and examples. The authors satisfactorily answer their central question by demonstrating how field experiences foster intellectual curiosity, self-criticism, and intercultural sensitivity. The final reflections on the need for communication between communities of practice and for ethical action in diverse contexts flow logically from the text’s body.
6. References
The references are relevant, current, and varied. They include classic sources (Bourdieu, Lave, and Wenger) and recent ones (Bradley & Kahn 2024; Farah et al. 2024), demonstrating an effort to situate the debate within a contemporary framework. However, to enrich the conceptual framework, the bibliography should be expanded with recent studies on critical pedagogies or contemporary approaches to experiential learning.
7. Tables and figures
The text contains only two maps (Figures 1 and 2) that illustrate an excavated dwelling’s geographical location and layout. They are clear and relevant and help to contextualise the described experiences.
However, it would be advisable to incorporate additional visual elements —such as diagrams of the pedagogical design or the proposed learning process— that help to better visualise the relationship between theory and practice.

In summary, this is a solid, reflective article that contributes significantly to the teaching of archaeology. Its strength lies in its critical approach and integration of educational theory and practice. With slight methodological adjustments and an expansion of the empirical base, the text would have a high potential impact on the discussion about university pedagogy and experiential learning.

We very much appreciate the considerable thought and time this reviewer devoted to reviewing our paper. The current draft has been modified following their suggestions as follows.

We expanded our description of the field program's pedagogial structure and objectives in the section "Putting Thought into Action on Archaeological FieldSchools." This includes adding two tables that summarize the pedagogical structure along with a more detailed discussion of the sorts of research students conducted. We added a figure that conveys a sense of how students recorded their excavations (Figure 4).  Figure 1 in "Learning as a Social Process" was also added to visually express our model of learning.

We did not gather systematic data, through surveys and other means, on the program's impact on the careers of its alumni. We assessed such impacts through conversations in the field and over the many years we have been in contact with our former students. Field programs are intimate settings; participants are forever talking with and observing one another. These intense, holistic interactions provided us with the feedback we needed to know who was learning what, how well the process was going, and the state of group and individual morale. By the semester's end, it was pretty clear how well the program had gone and what we needed to change to improve the experience. We modified aspects of the curriculum every year we offered the program.

As suggested, we expanded the references to better situate our work within the fields of experiential, inquiry-based, and critical pedagogy. We appreciate the prod to do just that.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors, please improve the following aspects of the manuscript:
-Review the citations. Do not use : followed by the page number; use p. instead.
-Review the list of references; there are errors in the italics or missing data in some references. If possible, include the DOI in all references.

-The discussion and theoretical section need to be improved by adding references from the last five years. In particular, there is a significant lack of references in the ection 4 and 6 of the theoretical framework.

-- As this is a theoretical article, the authors do not clarify the methodology they have followed. Have they carried out a documentary analysis? How? Why?

-- Where is the discussion? There are hardly any references in the conclusions; this needs to be improved. Add future directions and limitations.

Author Response

Dear authors, please improve the following aspects of the manuscript:
-Review the citations. Do not use : followed by the page number; use p. instead.
-Review the list of references; there are errors in the italics or missing data in some references. If possible, include the DOI in all references.

-The discussion and theoretical section need to be improved by adding references from the last five years. In particular, there is a significant lack of references in the ection 4 and 6 of the theoretical framework.

-- As this is a theoretical article, the authors do not clarify the methodology they have followed. Have they carried out a documentary analysis? How? Why?

-- Where is the discussion? There are hardly any references in the conclusions; this needs to be improved. Add future directions and limitations.

We appreciate the reviewer's very helpful comments on our paper. We have modified the article following their suggestions as follows:

We have changed the theoretical section, now including a consideration of the epistemological bases of our arguments (Introduction). In line with these efforts, we set our arguments clearly within the literature on inquiry-based, critical, and experiential learning.

We have also sought to make clearer the teaching and assessment methods we used on the field program (especially in the sections "Learning How to Know," "Evaluation of Student Work'" and "Learning how to Know Others."

A section on "Limits and Missed Opportunities" points towards how the curriculum we pursued could be improved. The "Conclusions" have been significantly rewritten, returning to, and advancing, themes raised in the Introduction.

We reviewed the bibliography and made corrections to the references. We would like to hold off further work systematizing formats for the references until we know how they should appear in the final publication.  

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for submitting this valuable manuscript, which addresses a timely and relevant topic within the educational and anthropological fields. The article “Lifelong Learning and Archaeological Field Schools” provides a meaningful perspective on experiential learning and highlights the formative role of archaeological field schools in developing reflective competencies and lifelong learning. The manuscript is clearly written and well structured, successfully illustrating the concept of communities of practice in an interdisciplinary context.
However, the paper is predominantly reflective and narrative in nature, based mainly on the authors’ experience, without a clearly defined methodological section or a systematic analysis of data. This limits the scientific rigor of the study. Some repetition is also observed in the theoretical part, and the bibliography would benefit from an update to include more recent sources in higher education pedagogy and experiential learning.

Recommendation: Accept with major revisions, addressing the following aspects:

– inclusion of a concise methodological section;

– clarification of the original contribution in relation to existing literature;

– reduction of redundancies and condensation of the theoretical discussion;

– update of the bibliography with recent and relevant references.

Author Response

Thank you for submitting this valuable manuscript, which addresses a timely and relevant topic within the educational and anthropological fields. The article “Lifelong Learning and Archaeological Field Schools” provides a meaningful perspective on experiential learning and highlights the formative role of archaeological field schools in developing reflective competencies and lifelong learning. The manuscript is clearly written and well structured, successfully illustrating the concept of communities of practice in an interdisciplinary context.
However, the paper is predominantly reflective and narrative in nature, based mainly on the authors’ experience, without a clearly defined methodological section or a systematic analysis of data. This limits the scientific rigor of the study. Some repetition is also observed in the theoretical part, and the bibliography would benefit from an update to include more recent sources in higher education pedagogy and experiential learning.

Recommendation: Accept with major revisions, addressing the following aspects:

– inclusion of a concise methodological section;

– clarification of the original contribution in relation to existing literature;

– reduction of redundancies and condensation of the theoretical discussion;

– update of the bibliography with recent and relevant references.

We appreciate the reviewer's careful evaluation of our paper. Following their suggestions, we have modified the article as follows.

We have expanded our discussion of our teaching methods, especially in the section, "Learning How to Know," "Evaluation of Student Work," and "Learning How to Know Others." The methods we employed in our teaching are founded on direct and repeated interaction with students. It was through these dealings that we constantly modified our pedagogy to meet their differet needs and assess what, and how well, they were learning. We did not employ surveys or other measures to accomplish these aims as we were very much with them during the semester and remained in close touch afterwards.

We considerably expanded the sections, beginning with the Introduction, that set our work within the fields of experiential, inquiry-based, and critical learning. The references have been updated accordingly. 

We rewrote the theoretical sections, including a more explicit consideration of the epistemology on which our work, and the arguments advanced in the article, are based.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Your essay, I believe, is solid on originality. In my first review, I advised abridging the first four (4) pages to an introductory paragraph or two. The referred text I can sum up as grounded in John Dewey, in a restatement of the standard understanding of the scientific method, and in the aim of making students more self aware by confronting their comfortable assumptions  by confronting them with communities that seem not to share these assumptions. This amounts to affirming that only a village can educate a child (or a BA aspirant). I pause to note that comfortable assumptions are not necessarily false, or that uncomfortable assumptions are, by virtue of their discomfort, necessarily true. It is plausible that western students operate on the basis of "untried, historically conditioned, culturally constructed assumptions." (230-231) Are the assumptions they confront in other communities of practice free from such blinders? 

    Howsoever that may be, the main objective for you, as I stated, regardless of the truth status of the assumptions of competing communities of practice, is the way in which confrontation with such contribute to students; self awareness, capacity for critical thinking, but why not say so succinctly and leave behind matters of epistemology? Get on directly, I advise, with your perspective on anthropology as a means towards that end and with the students' experiences in Honduras as illustrating the usefulness of that means. Instead of producing a more succinct essay, to my surprise I found an even longer, and in my opinion, less focused argument.

Author Response

Your essay, I believe, is solid on originality. In my first review, I advised abridging the first four (4) pages to an introductory paragraph or two. The referred text I can sum up as grounded in John Dewey, in a restatement of the standard understanding of the scientific method, and in the aim of making students more self aware by confronting their comfortable assumptions  by confronting them with communities that seem not to share these assumptions. This amounts to affirming that only a village can educate a child (or a BA aspirant). I pause to note that comfortable assumptions are not necessarily false, or that uncomfortable assumptions are, by virtue of their discomfort, necessarily true. It is plausible that western students operate on the basis of "untried, historically conditioned, culturally constructed assumptions." (230-231) Are the assumptions they confront in other communities of practice free from such blinders? 

    Howsoever that may be, the main objective for you, as I stated, regardless of the truth status of the assumptions of competing communities of practice, is the way in which confrontation with such contribute to students; self awareness, capacity for critical thinking, but why not say so succinctly and leave behind matters of epistemology? Get on directly, I advise, with your perspective on anthropology as a means towards that end and with the students' experiences in Honduras as illustrating the usefulness of that means. Instead of producing a more succinct essay, to my surprise I found an even longer, and in my opinion, less focused argument.

We understand your point about shortening the discussion of the theory informing our work with students. Nonetheless, we are reticent to proceed too far in this direction. For one thing, this suggestion conflicts with recommendations made by commentators in the first round who urged us to elaborate on the epistemological premises of our approach to learning and to set our work more clearly within the domains of experiential, critical, and inquiry-based learning. We took these comments to heart primarily for two reasons. First, the earlier draft largely floated free of that intellectual context. As such, readers interested in our pedagogy would either find it hard to place it within established streams of thought on experiential learning or would wonder why we had not bothered to make those connections. Second, it is our impression that anthropologists in general, and archaeologists in particular, have not delved deeply into the literature on critical, experiential, and inquiry-based pedagogy. This is especially true in the United States. We would like, through this article, to encourage our colleagues to look carefully at the work of scholars in these fields.  

Meeting the calls of earlier reviewers to beef up the sections on epistemology and to bring in more references to relevant pedagogical theory makes it difficult to shorten the three sections preceding Anthropology as a Community of Practice. As a compromise, we tried to shorten the sections dealing with pedagogical theories where we could.

On the issue of length, you are correct that the article is now longer than it was in the first draft. This, again, is largely due to the suggestions of two earlier commentators. Their calls for some discussion of how we evaluated student work in the field, what the limits of our work were, and how those deficiencies might be addressed in the future were well-taken. Consequently, we added several sections dealing with those topics. It was also clear from earlier comments that we did not adequately describe what students actually did when conducting their research and how their learning progressed. We added two tables to summarize the learning timeline. We also elaborated on how the undergraduates became members of the archaeological community of practice as they pursued their independent investigations.

You raised the important point that the assumptions informing the inquiries of every community of practice are not necessarily correct simply because they exist. We address this concern in The Many Forms of Knowledge section by specifying that the truth claims made by members of any community of practice are evidenced-based and context-specific. We go on to argue that members of no one community know all there is to master about any topic. Hence the need to find ways of working across these knowledge communities to address problems no one community of practice can adequately confront on their own.

In sum, we sympathize with your call for succinctness. We have tried to pare down some of the verbiage in the first four pages but do not see how we can go further if we also want to follow through on the calls of earlier reviewers to set our work, and its rationale, more fully and clearly in its intellectual context.   

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,
Thank you for improving the manuscript. You still need to review the spacing in the bibliography.

Author Response

Dear authors,
Thank you for improving the manuscript. You still need to review the spacing in the bibliography.

We went over our references and corrected problems with their formatting; thank you for pointing out these issues. We also worked on clarifying our arguments and ensuring that the points made in the Conclusion relate to those arguments in an explicit and coherent manner. In doing so, we were especially concerned that issues of holistic learning and the importance of inquiry-based education raised in the Introduction were brought back into the discussion here. 

Thank you for your insightful suggestions on our article.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This revision is more focused, less repetitious, by far, than its predecessors. Your point is easier to grasp, and your narrative more engaging.