Assessment of Archeological Interpretation > Assessment >

Assessment

Use the questions below to assess an interpretive effort. The model works for exhibits, public programs, and publications, to name a few. A detailed version of the interpretive analysis model is available in pdf format. A worksheet, including a sample product for evaluation, is also available.

Overarching questions

The assessment process aims to encourage refinement and development of interpretive materials so that the subject matter and delivery remains fresh and engaging. Here are some overarching questions.

What did you intend your interpretive product to achieve? Is it meeting your expectations?
How do archeological materials and interpretive techniques intersect?
How can you tell that your interpretive product is having the desired effect of engaging contemporary visitors with the people, places, and events of the past?

Using the Interpretive Analysis Model

Use the questions below to guide your evaluation of the interpretive program you produced in the Interpretive Process Model or of another interpretive product. Decide on the best way to present your evaluation and make sure that it addresses all the questions as they relate to the subheadings.

Tangible resources: Identify a resource or resources that can be grasped, either physically or mentally.
Tangible resources offer an interpretive hook into the archeological process and its meaning to contemporary visitors. Remains from the past evoke curiosity and excite imagination. They can be a launching point for visitors to make their own interpretations from evidence and form their own ideas.
- What places, objects, people, or events are being interpreted?
- What is the interpretive product or service helping the audience care more about?
- What tangible resources act as the icon?
Intangible meanings: Identify meanings that may be abstract, such as beauty or truth.
The relationship between tangible and intangible meanings is the basis of good interpretation. Intangible meanings help audiences to find intellectual and emotional connections with the past that are personally relevant. Intangible meanings speak to different people in different ways.
- Identify possible intangible meanings by listing the meanings you recognize.
- Which of the intangible meanings are universal concepts?
- How do you involve visitors in the discovery of these intangible meanings?
- How can you involve visitors in the discovery of these intangible meanings?
- Can you identify any areas of bias in your interpretation?
Interpretive opportunities: Identify opportunities for connections to resource meanings and the interpretive methods used to develop them.
Interpretive opportunities happen when archeologists or interpreters recognize moments that allow their knowledge and skills to influence people’s ideas, allow emotions to come into play, and encourage new ways of looking at material remains or graspable ideas. Interpretive opportunities enable you to present your ideas about the resources and transform people’s thinking about them.
- How have you developed opportunities to facilitate connections between the meanings of the resource and the interests of the audience?
- What specific methods are used?
Compelling stories: Identify which opportunities favor emotional connections and which favor intellectual connections to resource meanings.
The idea behind Compelling Stories is to for interpreters to encourage personal relationships with park resources by engaging people’s hearts and minds. Interpreters use Compelling Stories to develop the essential and relevant stories of each park. They also apply the interpretive process—tangible icons, intangible meanings, and universal concepts—to create the stories. Visitors, as a result, learn to relate resources to larger contexts and concepts such as society, culture, and history.
- What is the intent behind the opportunities created by the interpretation?
- How are the interpretive opportunities used to affect the audience?
- Did the program as a whole help the audience feel and think differently about the resource? How do you know?
Identify the cohesive development of a relevant idea or ideas.
Like a joke or story told in an effective way, the order of things can be very important. Opportunities for emotional connection often depend on intellectual understandings provided earlier. If something is presenting in a cohesive and coherent way, it is more likely to make sense to an audience.
- Does the product have a focus?
- Is the focus a meaningful idea or ideas, or is it a topic or chronology?
- Do the concepts developed include universal concepts?
- Does the program develop an idea?
- Does it say something meaningful about the resource?
- Is the idea relevant to the audience? How do you know?
- How did the arrangement of opportunities for accessing the material emotionally and intellectually contribute to the development of the program’s central idea?
The big picture: Consider the effect of the product as a whole.
After working closely on a project for an extended period, you may have difficulty stepping back to evaluate whether the program really does what you think. Use the questions below to gain perspective.
- What is its effect?
- Is it saying anything meaningful—not just in isolation at one point in the program but as an understandable and logical whole— to someone without pre-existing knowledge of archeology or the resource?
- Does the product lead the way or does it ask the audience to do the work and create their own story from the links and opportunities provided?
- Is the interpretive product successful as a catalyst for creating opportunities for the audience to form their own intellectual and emotional connections to the meanings and significance inherent in the resource?
- Is the product appropriate for the audience?
- Does it provide a clear focus for their connection with the resource by demonstrating the cohesive development of a relevant idea or ideas, rather than relying primarily on a recital of a chronological narrative or a series of facts?
Working together: Compare your analysis with the analysis of others.
Collaboration between archeologists and interpreters can result in richer interpretive products that enliven the past and deepen understanding. It is important to ask each other questions when your own knowledge is thin, and to discuss the development of interpretive programs using archeology.
- What other people have you identified as resources in the course of creating the program?
- How does your program and analysis compare with that of other fields or interpreters?
- How might your experience help others?
- What have you, or what can you, learn from other archeologists’ analyses?
What next? Identify ways to improve the product or service.
There is always room for improvement. Build on successful interpretative elements that are already there and find ways to make the interpretation more effective.
- Drawing on the answers to the questions above, what would make your program more effective? How might more opportunities for accessing the material, another approach in style or media, or a different sequence might improve it?
- Is the central idea holding together?
- Does the material provide opportunities for connections? Do the tangible/intangible links need editing and rearranging to make the development of the central idea more cohesive?

Submit a case study

Help other archeologists and interpreters learn from your experience. Submit a case study! Submission guidelines are here.