For Educators

Welcome Educators!

Do you teach in classrooms or in museums? Do you work with youth organizations like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, or 4-H? Are you a parent seeking to expand your child’s understanding of people and history?

If you answered “Yes!” to any of these questions, the public archaeologists at the Kentucky Archaeological Survey are ready to help.

Our commitment to education takes many forms. From these pages, you can:

  • Access printed and online resources
  • Request our help finding just the right resource or resource person to meet your educational needs
  • Schedule classroom visits (Grade 3-college) targeted to your specific curricular needs
  • Find out about opportunities for advanced students to become involved in KAS research
  • Learn about occasional KAS workshops and staff presentations at state teacher conferences

Kentucky’s long history – of Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and African-Americans – held within Kentucky’s archaeological sites provides the foundation for our lesson plans, booklets, and documentaries. We know these topics best. We also know Kentucky educators are always looking for resources targeting our Commonwealth’s unique history and culture to challenge their students to make the link between themselves and the past.

And to other educators who have come to our website seeking help – don’t let our Kentucky focus deter you. Topics of relevance for the Social Studies, Sciences, and Language Arts find representation in Kentucky’s past and in its archaeology.

A celebration of Kentucky’s past is here for you. Welcome!

Lesson Plans and Other Learning Materials

Dig Magazine articles and lesson plans

These articles for children ages 9-14 appeared in the pages of Dig Magazine, published by Cricket Media until 2019. They are about three very different topics: ancient Native American dogs, a carved animal bone pin, Native musical instruments, and a song in the Shawnee language.

Lesson plans to accompany these articles can be found here:

Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate lesson plans

Exploring History in Your Own Backyard: The Ashland Estate – An Historical Archaeology Resource Guide for Elementary and Middle School Teachers (Grades 4-8) by Cecelia Manosa (2012). 47 pages, includes handouts/worksheets, list of resources.

KAS archaeologists spent several years researching at Ashland, The Henry Clay Estate near downtown Lexington. An early privy, slave quarters, and the icehouse were among the areas they examined.

Involvement of schoolchildren in our research prompted us to prepare a resource guide for elementary and middle school teachers. In it are lessons that laid a foundation for the students’ visit and for additional learning once they returned to the classroom. These lessons target chronology, and why studying the past is important; and explore foodways by examining what archaeologists found in the privy. They also ask students to consider the ethics of archaeology and what they can do to enhance the preservation of sites.

Preservation Kentucky webinar

At the request of Preservation Kentucky, KAS Education Director A. Gwynn Henderson presented an hour-long webinar about Kentucky’s Native American history for Kentucky Archaeology Month 2018. Drawing from our Commonwealth’s rich archaeological record of these ancient peoples, this webinar reviews what archaeologists have learned and inferred about Native peoples’ diverse lifeways, technologies, settlements, and ritual sites prior to the arrival of Europeans.