Formal Education up to Age 18, Archaeology in

Introduction

When we look at the place of archaeology in formal education in the United Kingdom, we see a paradox. Archaeology is extremely popular with the general public and with the media. Millions of people are members of organizations like the National Trust, up to 3 million viewers will regularly watch TV programs on archaeology, many thousands attend events such as the Festival of British Archaeology, and over 200,000 are members of local societies and clubs concerned with the historic environment, and yet archaeology has no explicit place in the school curriculum. The reason may be simple, that archaeology had not yet established itself as an academic subject in universities at the time when the school curriculum was being determined in the later nineteenth century. Subjects like history and geography were well established and could claim a presence in the curriculum. The nineteenth century curriculum has proven very hard to change and is still the basis for education up to the...