Wikipedia:Canada Education Program/Courses/Archaeology and Popular Culture (Grant Aylesworth)/Course description

Course description
This course will review popular culture ideas about archaeology and studying the past and include a variety of perspectives. In popular culture, fictional archaeologists inhabit books, movies, video games, graphic novels, toys, and more. Representations of archaeologists, including “Adventurer”, “Detective”, “Caretaker”, and “Revealer of the Profound” are common. In contemporary mass media, ideas related to archaeology permeate the world around us. Current Canadian and American popular culture is overflowing with examples of our fascination with material culture and artifacts. There are literally dozens of television shows, films, and other media that have archaeology and material culture as one of their central themes. We will investigate archaeology in popular culture, folk archaeology, archaeological metaphors, and representations of the past in a wide variety of media. We will investigate and learn about the meaning of archaeology in contemporary popular culture and the role of popular culture in contemporary archaeology.

Wikipedia Assignment
Your assignment is to create a new Wikipedia article that is related to the course by following the process outlined below. In addition to adding new Wikipedia articles, students can edit relevant existing articles and lists. There are a number of lists that we can update for this course, and we can also work on updating existing relevant articles. Extra work you do will count towards your overall contribution grade for the course.

Probably everyone in the class uses Wikipedia weekly, if not daily. Rather than discouraging the use of Wikipedia, the class will take an active role in making a contribution by adding new articles. This assignment will take us out of our typical role with respect to Wikipedia, that of consumers of information, and make us producers. Through this process, we will learn about research, citation, writing style, further details about topics related to the course, and much more. Lastly, by contributing and engaging with Wikipedia in a deeper and more meaningful way than is typical, we will arrive at a much better understanding of the workings of a resource that we use so frequently.

A Few Related Wikipedia Pages
Feel free to add any other useful Wikipedia pages here. Many of these needs some work.
 * List of fictional anthropologists
 * Category: Fictional Archaeologists
 * Category:Fictional characters by occupation
 * Portal:Indiana Jones
 * WikiProject Indiana Jones
 * WikiProject Archaeology
 * List of fictional Romans

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