When Kathryn Clancy and colleagues published the results of their SAFE survey, many of us who conduct field research were not surprised by the numbers.

Sexual harassment and assault frequently occur during field research and students and trainees are subjected to harassing behavior more frequently than senior scientists. This research quantified what many of us knew, but never spoke openly of—the field research we love can put us in awkward and even harmful situations. We can be subjected to inappropriate comments, job assignments based on gender and not ability, and isolation with colleagues who make us feel uncomfortable. Experienced and witnessed harassment and assault that can accompany field work destroys the joy of research and can even end the career aspirations of talented, young scholars.

In archaeology the issue of sexual harassment and assault of students is even more troubling because it may be institutionalized. Most colleges and universities require anthropology undergraduate majors, pursuing a career in archaeology, to complete an archaeological field school to fulfill their degree requirements. Field schools are four- to eight-week courses of sustained field training that include instruction and practice in various field techniques. The structure of the field school requires students to conduct field work for an eight-hour day, five days a week, through the duration of the course. Field sites often are isolated and students frequently live at the site throughout the field school’s duration.

Now that we have a better understanding of how the factors field research converge to put students at risk of harassment and assault, our research team, including Drs. Shawn Lambert, Emily Beahm, and Carl Drexler, and I decided it was time to research what can be done to reduce and prevent sexual harassment at archaeological field schools. We began by looking at disciplines outside of archaeology to explore suggestions others scholars have made to prevent and reduce sexual harassment and assault. We then aimed to contextualize these preventative measures within the field school context. This literature review resulted in the identification of five themes—preparation, climate and culture, supervisory hierarchies, reporting mechanisms, and support—and associated actionable items that field directors can take to reduce harassment while promoting student safety and inclusivity. In our article, Creating and Supporting a Harassment- and Assault-Free Field School, we report these themes and ways to implement them in the context of a field school and other field research environments.

Although we make these recommendations based on research from other fields, these recommendations must be studied further. Some of these recommendations may not reduce or prevent harassment and assault, and there is research suggesting that certain steps organizations take actually may lead to increased harassment. During the next phases of our research project, funded by the National Science Foundation (Award No. 1937392), we will work closely with field school directors and their students to understand how the recommendations we’ve made can be implemented and how implementation affects field school instruction, student learning, and students’ self-efficacy and sense of belonging in archaeology. 

Carol E. Colaninno is a research assistant professor at the Center for STEM Research, Education, & Outreach at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She is an archaeologist and emphasizes discipline-based education research in archaeology. Her main area of research focuses on documenting effects of student learning and persistence with participation in field-based learning experiences. The work reported in our article is conducted in collaboration with Drs. Shawn Lambert, assistant professor at Mississippi State University, Emily Beahm, station archeologist, Arkansas Archeological Survey, and Carl Drexler, station archeologist, Arkansas Archeological Survey.

Creating and Supporting a Harassment- and Assault-Free Field School is available to read now, free of charge, in the new issue of Advances in Archaeological Practice.