Suzanne Finney: Experiential Learning and Archaelogy
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A Case of Experiential Learning and Archaeology: The Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan
“Now of course the obvious question is how does experiential learning work when it’s the instructor who had the experience and not the students? And this is something I am still working on, but the idea behind this journey was to see how this experience, the overnight and day sail on this restored and refitted whaling ship, could be translated into instructional tools for anthropology and archaeology classes, and also how this experience might help to interpret material remains in the archaeological record, which could also be explained to students.”
Finney lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, and lectures in the University of Hawaii system. She grew up in Rhode Island where she first began to explore the story of whaling. Since moving to Hawaii her focus has been research, study, and fieldwork in maritime archaeology. Finney has conducted fieldwork on 19th- and 20th-century sites throughout Hawaii and Micronesia, including a site where the CSS Shenandoah destroyed four whaling ships in April 1865. Her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii explores the methods New Bedford whaleship owners and whaling masters used to minimize their economic risk from whaling.