Transforming a sow’s ear into a silk purse, a unique educational program has been instituted at Fort Frederica National Monument through the combined efforts of the National Park Service and the Glynn County (Georgia) School System. Following the discovery of a modern trench backfilled with colonial artifacts from previous excavations at Frederica, the National Park Service developed an educational program highlighting colonial archaeology for Glynn County fourth grade students and their teachers. The program consists of a training workshop for teachers, one day of excavation by each class, artifact analysis in the classroom, and student-designed artifact displays. The trench is virtually a renewable archaeological resource: it is scheduled to be refilled with the recently-excavated artifacts this year, and excavations will continue indefinitely. Since burying artifact collections in lieu of curation is a surprising procedure to most contemporary archaeologists, the genesis of Shiner’s Trench is reviewed in this paper. An overview of the teaching program is then presented that assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a remarkable cooperative venture in historical archaeology education.https://scholar.utc.edu/archaeology-reports/1005/thumbnail.jp
