The 2010 SEAC Public Outreach Grant has been awarded to Fort Frederica National Monument, St. Simons Island, Georgia, for their project “Digging History” at Fort Frederica: Community Archaeology Festival. The festival features SGA’s ArchaeoBus.
SEAC is the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. It was founded in the 1930s to create a forum for archaeologists working across the Southeast to get together and discuss what they were finding during federally-funded projects.
SEAC has recently announced:
The 2010 SEAC Public Outreach Grant was awarded to Fort Frederica National Monument, St. Simons Island, Georgia, for their project “Digging History” at Fort Frederica: Community Archaeology Festival.
Fort Frederica National Monument has already been serving over 1,000 4th-grade students in an award-winning archeology education program in partnership with the Glynn County School System and Board of Education. The SEAC Public Outreach Grant will help fund an expansion of this program into a community archaeology festival to be held in May to coincide with Georgia Archaeology Awareness Month. In addition to the one-day festival, the Fort will reach out to under-served audiences by welcoming local after-school programs on the afternoon preceding the festival. The Fort hopes to make this pilot project into an annual event.
The festival will enable park visitors to interact with the past by engaging in hands-on archaeology discovery stations to learn about colonial life. The festival will feature interactive archaeology games and activities, displays, an artifact identification booth, and presentations. The festival will also feature the Society for Georgia Archaeology’s new ArchaeoBus. The ArchaeoBus is a restored bookmobile that travels around the state of Georgia to educate students and community groups about the science of archaeology.
The SEAC grant will help pay for supplies and materials to construct the interactive archaeology games and activities, as well as to provide stipends for archaeologists and educators assisting with the event. After the event, the games and activities will be further used for other park programs and outreach projects.
What great news!
Posted online on Monday, May 24th, 2010