You may inadvertently be teaching your students to go out on weekends and destroy archaeological sites. In fact, David Dose, a sixth grade teacher at Kellogg Middle School in Idaho was prosecuted by the U.S. National Parks Service for damage done to the Crumbling Kiva Ruin in Arizona's Glen Canyon National Park in 1994. Mr. Dose's well-intentioned but damaging field trip caused irreparable damage to a 700 year old archaeological site. Preservation of archaeological sites must be a primary and major part of any classroom instruction on archaeology. When an archaeologist excavates a site, very often the artifacts recovered are one of the least interesting outcomes of the excavation.
All archaeological excavations start with a question.
This question determines the research strategy - how the site is excavated and what type of information will be recorded. Archaeologists usually don't have much money, and need to work efficiently to get the answers to their questions as efficiently as possible. Archaeologists look at stratigraphy - the layers of soils and deposits in a site. These may tell us about sequences of events or cultures. Archaeologists look for evidence of trade and contact between different groups of people.