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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY
is certainly potential for greater cooperation. Such cross-disciplinary programs remain well worth pursuing. What History & Archaeology may lose in the numbers of Humanities Geographers currently affiliated with us, the Department is likely to win back – at least in part – via enrollees from Geography and Geology in such joint programs. The opportunity to get our Archaeology students into Life Science’s diving program may yet prove a further recruiter for Archaeology at a time when Jamaica’s tourism sector is proposing to foreground “the sunken city” of Port Royal. Mona has facilities to equip our graduates to serve these needs. Off campus there was a successful Archaeological Field School at a former coffee estate in the Blue Mountains. This was the first actual rather than virtual field school since the pandemic. Dr. Atkinson-Swaby was successful in negotiating support for an actual field school. The potential for returning to field schools and field trips made the extensive repairs to the Department’s now venerable minivan a high priority and I am grateful to the Campus Bursar’s support for this, and to Toyota Jamaica for undertaking the work despite the tab the University had already run up there. Conversations following comments dismissing the limited field experi- ence of our archaeology graduates that were offered at a retreat for the Board of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, led to an offer from the Trust’s Director to offer places, with some pocket and travel money, to some of our field school graduates in future summers to dig with the Trust’s teams. The Trust is the leading employer of archaeologists in Jamaica and opportunities for our archaeology students to gain experience there should be beneficial, both when they return their final year’s courses and for the Trust. These various efforts to transform our undergraduate offerings to appeal to stu- dents across the campus involved almost every member of the Department. In our undergraduate teaching the goal was to move beyond top-down demands for bums-in-seats to fill up our courses. Instead, we sought to make an advan- tage out of reaching out to sister departments for joint degrees – with Journalism and International Relations already and, potentially, Tourism and Geography in future. Here I believe the Department can either offer or develop programs to bring thoughtful students from other programs into our lectures and tutorials. Classes where they can develop a broader range of skillsets which they can then deploy for interesting careers. SEMINARS AND OUTREACH On the broader research front, we have revived the Department Seminar with in-per- son papers delivered to a mixed audience of face-to-face and distance attendees. Not all Department members have presented or attended, but a larger proportion did so than in previous years. This format means that papers are presented to an
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