A new graduate program at Binghamton University will give students a chance to study public archaeology, not by digging up bones, but rather by looking into how the public engages with the subject.

The program, which began this year, takes a different approach to teaching archaeology. According to Matthew Sanger, the co-chair of the program and an assistant professor in the anthropology department, public archaeology focuses on the ways archaeology can affect the general population.

This includes fields such as cultural resource management, which looks at developing areas and making sure nothing culturally significant is destroyed. It can also focus on museum curation and government departments which employ archaeologists in state and national parks.

“Working with the public directly, telling them information about archaeology, it’s a very different kind of archaeology practice,” Sanger said. “This program is all about the way in which archaeologists can interact with the public at large.”

The program was started three years ago by Randall McGuire, a professor of anthropology at BU, and Nina Versaggi, the director of the public archaeology facility at BU. Sanger, who was hired specifically for the task of co-chairing the program, said it took three years to get the master’s degree in public archaeology (MAPA) on its feet; there is currently only one student enrolled, but he hopes to increase that number.

Usually archaeology is taught in an academic setting, meaning that the emphasis is on furthering research in the field. The new program, according to Sanger, teaches students to use archaeology to approach a community that has different levels of education and understanding of archaeology.

”They don’t need Ph.D.’s to do that kind of work and they don’t need the same kind of skill sets,” Sanger said. “This program was designed to specifically address that need of non-academic archaeology.”

Katherine Seeber, the graduate assistant for the MAPA program and a second-year graduate student studying archaeology, said that out of the 15,000 archaeology jobs in the United States, about 11,000 to 12,000 of them are in the field of public archaeology.

“This program is vital because BU trains a lot of archaeologists,” Seeber wrote in an email. “Having this program gives folks an opportunity to be trained in a way that prepares them for more diverse jobs.”

Angela Mccomb, the only current student in the program and a first-year graduate student, said she plans on helping communities that have been impacted by disasters reclaim their heritage and history with the degree.

“Home is more than four walls and a roof, reconnecting to your community and heritage are vital parts of recovery,” Mccomb wrote in an email. “The MAPA program is giving me the knowledge and ability to do that.”

Sanger also said he hopes the program can show the public why archaeology is necessary and increase overall interest in the field.

“There are some fields that are self-relevant for why they are important, but archaeology is this esoteric thing,” Sanger said. “Why do we care about the past? What is important about the past? And that is mostly because people don’t know very much about the past.”

Students applying to the program must have an undergraduate degree in a program such as anthropology, history or environmental studies, as well as some field experience.