Archaeology News Online
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2017
Maintaining the public’s interest in the past has long been a major concern among archaeologists, and practitioners since Mortimer Wheeler have appreciated the value of reporting their finds through mass media outlets (Moshenska and Schadla-Hall 2011). While teaching the honors module Archaeology in Contemporary Society at the University of Chester in 2015, I wanted to assess the portrayal of our discipline in the news. I put together a computer lab session that collated headlines into word clouds and found some peculiarities of reporting across news sources. Yet when it came time to producing essays, few students chose to write about this subject. While there have been some great studies of archaeology in the media, they are aging fast and new work has yet to catch up with the digital world of online news.