📖Program Curriculum
Research Report: Archaeological Heritage Management 90 credits
This course is designed to equip heritage management practitioners with the ability to conduct independent research and application of relevant (salient) principles in practice. The course comprises two components. These are coursework and a research report. The coursework component will provide guided learning, which will prepare the students for independent research at this level. The Research Report will allow students to demonstrate their ability to independently apply the theoretical knowledge and advanced research skills taught in the optional coursework courses.
ARCL7029A Public and Heritage Archaeology 1st Quarter elective 30 credits, Prof. Alex Schoeman
The course aims to prepare archaeologists, both academic and those involved with the management or exhibition of heritage, to deal with the issues in the field. Public and heritage archaeology is a field that is fraught with complex issues in South Africa. Remarkably, there are few university-level courses that prepare archaeologists to deal with these issues. Instead, academic archaeologists, who are often called upon to engage as consultants to heritage developments, have to make their own way through the labyrinthine issues around heritage. The course focuses primarily on the presentation and re-presentation of the past in public spaces and offers practical training on how to go about constructing visitor experiences to heritage sites.
ARCL7027A Geographical Information Systems for Heritage Resource Management 1st Quarter elective 30 credits, Prof. Karim Sadr
This course provides students with an advanced understanding of GIS through hands-on experience. The aim of the course is to develop the ability of the students to pre-process, analyse and critically assess a variety of datasets and apply the findings to a range of topics addressed by GIS professionals and cultural heritage resources managers.
The course will focus on in-depth knowledge of the sourcing of primary quantitative and qualitative data and their processing to create fundamental datasets for spatial analysis and problem solving. Students for example will learn to analyse site distributions, surface terrain characteristics and derived properties, and integrate GIS with remote sensing within standard and web-based GIS platforms. The course will equip students with practical skills in the application of GIS in the heritage management environment.
ARCL7026A Archaeotourism 2nd Quarter elective 30 credits, Prof. Sarah Wurz
This course is designed to equip students with a thorough understanding of responsible archaeotourism. In archaeotourism sensitive non-renewable archaeological sites are often utilized without engaging with theory development in the field or optimal conservation management structures in place. There is a need for an archaeologically centered course for those interested in developing their skills in the responsible archaeotourism industry. This course will fill this gap by providing information on international and local archaeological heritage that can be utilized as tourism resources, on ‘packaging’ archaeological resources to tourist audiences and on conservation management strategies and policies.
ARCL7028A Cultural Resource Management Archaeology in the Field and Laboratory 3rd Quarter elective 30 credits Dr Jerome Reynard, Dr Chrissie Sievers, Dr Dominic Stratford and Prof. Sarah Wurz
This course is designed to equip students with skills required in Archaeological Impact Assessments (AIA) contexts. These include the ability to engage with ancient and modern landscapes and to accurately identify those processes that affect for formation, integrity and preservations of archaeological assemblages found in all environments, as well as the identification of key archaeological remains. Landscape scale research will focus on training in geoarchaeological techniques that will help refine context documentation and assessment thereby providing greater resolution in submitted reports which are often primary sources of evidence for contractors and other CRM or academic archaeologists. The recovered remains component will introduce the skills required to identify anthropogenic lithic, botanical and osteological remains recovered from archaeological sites.
ARCL7030A Rock Art management 4th Quarter elective 30 credits Dr Catherine Namono
Rock art is a non-renewable archaeological resource found in almost all parts of the World. It is an area of archaeology that almost all archaeologists and the public encounter and often utilize without engaging with optimal current conservation and management theory and practice. As an elective of Archaeological Heritage Management this course is designed to equip students with relevant skills to effectively manage rock art by exploring the intellectual and practical challenges with this process, cognizant of the political and ethical complexities associated with such conservation and management in Africa and abroad. Graduates from this course will be ideally suited for employ at a vast majority of rock art tourism destinations in southern Africa and elsewhere; at various heritage agencies and government departments where such skills are needed.
