A Summer Course on Siberian Archaeology for Foreign Students (2018, Students from the Republic of Korea)

Purpose. Teaching Siberian archaeology to foreign students has its own characteristics and requires a special approach. Not all terms and phenomena are equivalent to the language and archaeological experience of the students. Therefore, the teacher is unlikely to be able to make foreign students interested in their subject matter by simply giving lectures, since it is not always possible to achieve a full contact with the audience. The use of visual materials while conducting courses helps solve a lot of problems of teaching Siberian archaeology to foreign students. In archaeology, such a visual material is an archaeological site or an artifact. Thus, the method of “immersion” into the environment of the subject studied, which we implement as an excursion to archaeological sites while giving lectures directly at the place where the studied phenomenon can be found, is particularly popular as a way of teaching archaeology to foreigners. Results. Such a technique was implemented in 2018 by researchers of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of SB RAS and Professor Kang In Uk during the summer course of teaching Siberian archaeology to history students from Kyung Hee University (Seoul, the Republic of Korea). As a part of this course, students visited mound complexes and rock art objects in the Altai Mountains and ground burial sites of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Baraba forest-steppe region. The course included not only a detailed examination of the sites, but also lecturing at each of them. As our experience shows, the students were most interested in the topics resembling the ancient culture of the peoples of the Korean Peninsula, such as burial mounds, rock images of female shamans, Andronovo-type objects, etc. These subjects are relevant not only for research theses, but also as topics for individual research projects. This indicates that the goal of hosting a summer course on archaeology of Siberia for Korean students was achieved: the topic arouses deep interest among the audience. Conclusion. There is no doubt that the methodology of teaching Siberian archaeology to foreign students described in the present article is not only effective, but also has great prospects in the form of various master classes and workshops, as well as in the form of direct participation of foreign students in archaeological excavations in Siberia.