Modern archaeological education in Russia: solving the problems of humanitarians with the involvement of experience in the training of higher technical personnel

Abstract

Introduction. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the crisis state of Russian archaeological education and the need to find a way out of the current situation. The research objective: proposing ways out of the crisis of archaeological education based on the experience of training technical specialists. Materials and methods. Comparative-historical, classification and descriptive methods were used as a methodological basis that made it possible to compare the training systems of humanities and technical specialists, to classify the features of both systems and describe the current situation and ways out of it. The paper analyzes the researchers’ works of this problem, including the staff of the Moscow Polytechnic University, and uses the observations of the authors of the article. Results. An analysis of the experience of the Russian Empire showed that in the pre-Soviet period there was no unified system for the formation of archaeological personnel. The training history of the archaeologists in the Soviet Union was ambiguous, but as a result, a system of training highly qualified specialists was created that is now in a state of crisis. The training of archaeologists abroad is carried out according to two models, which is of concern to the foreign scientific community. Russian education needs to look for its own ways to change the situation in the formation of archaeological personnel. Conclusion. The crisis of archaeological education in Russia has administrative (formation of the higher education system), financial (low level of university science funding), scientific (spread of “black archaeology”), psychological (perception peculiarities of the current situation by Russian students) and a number of other reasons disclosed by us. This can be overcome considering the experience of creating professionals in technical specialties accumulated, in particular, at the Moscow Polytechnic University that we reveal on specific examples. This conclusion does not seem paradoxical in the context of the multidisciplinary nature of modern science and the growing economic demand for highly professional archaeological research.