Archaeological field school training and student well-being: a case study from the Netherlands

Abstract

Participating in archaeological activities is considered to have the potential to improve participants’ social and psychological well-being. Through a case study, we investigated whether this would also be the case with students participating in fieldwork for educational purposes. This question was investigated during the 2021 field school in archaeology for first-year undergraduate students at Leiden University. We asked 170 students to complete a mental well-being questionnaire at the start and end of two weeks of archaeological work. This article discusses the results of the quantitative measurements of subjective mental well-being that we gathered during this survey. The questionnaire was based on the well-being umbrella (University College London); it measured six positive and six negative emotions. The measurements show that the students had, on average, a fairly low level of negative emotions and a rather high level of positive emotions at the start. At the end of the field school, the group demonstrated some significant changes in their ratings for both positive emotions and negative emotions, but individual participants did not react similarly.