Since 2008 the Flinders Archaeology Department has run a blog, and for the past few years it has lived at https://flindersarchaeology.com/.
The blog was originally designed to provide a forum for students and staff to share information and to promote their experiences in doing and learning about archaeology. It has been a very successful endeavour, with almost 500 posts, 80,000 page views, some 978 email subscribers and on average 11-12,000 unique visitors each year. I suspect few other archaeology blogs around the world have statistics like this, and it’s something that we should be very proud of.
Unfortunately though, the blog is looking tired and there have been some questions raised about its purpose, audience and its relevance to students. For this reason, we are considering making some enhancements to the blog this year. We obviously need to do this carefully, and to ensure that we listen to users about what can be improved and what kinds of services the site should offer.
To this end, we are kicking off the project with a very quick survey and I ask all Flinders University archaeology students, ArchSoc members, staff, adjuncts, community members and industry partners to take 5 minutes to fill this form out. Once we have collated feedback, we will be holding a forum with interested volunteers to further discuss our plans before we begin to implement them over the rest of the year.
The survey can be accessed at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3L8LD87
If you’ve read the current (July) edition of Engage: The Magazine of the Graduate Programs in Archaeology, Cultural Heritage Management and Maritime Archaeology, you’ll have seen the article on ‘Where does a Graduate Degree Take You?’. In it, some of our graduated students discuss where they’re working now, what they’ve learnt since leaving university (including what topics proved to be most useful to them and why. This part makes Alice very happy), and how their degree experience prepared them to work in the heritage industry (if you haven’t seen Engage yet, then make sure you read it at our website http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/archaeology/archaeology-digital-library/graduate-program-bulletins.cfm. It contains all this and more).