Strategies for teaching bioarchaeology and palaeopathology in a master’s degree course in Archaeology: some considerations and activities from the Biological Anthropology course at the University of Salento (Lecce, Apulia, Italy)

My recent experience teaching Biological Anthropology in the master’s degree course in Archaeology at the University of Salento (6 Italian CFU = 6 European ECTS, 21 lectures, 42 hours in total plus a final oral exam) prompts me to make a few reflections. The first is on certain limitations due to prior knowledge or at least to the so-called prerequisites required of students, which are indispensable for tackling a broad and diverse course subject with awareness. The second point is about offering free study opportunities to students with excavations and workshops where they can put into practice the knowledge acquired to improve it. Teaching taphonomy, anthropology, and palaeopathology in the absence of a basis in osteology, i.e. skeletal anatomy, is impossible, or at the very least, not very successful. On the one hand, you can delegate the study of skeletal anatomy entirely to the student in a textbook, or you can spend part of the course explaining the physiology of the human skeleton and its orientation in space in consideration of anatomical planes. I adopted the second mode, thus spending 8 to 10 hours of the course on that and offering exercises and laboratory tests on learning material. In this way, basic skills could be acquired more quickly and with greater correlation ability. Thanks to this background, it was possible to approach the subsequent topics of the lectures to the point of developing critical skills in dealing with anthropological and paleopathological studies.