WHAT IS THE REGISTER'S FIELD SCHOOL CERTIFICATION?

Certifying your field school with the Register of Professional Archaeologists means that your field school meets a set of professional standards in the following five areas:

• Purpose. The field school must have a clear research design and curriculum design that integrates research with experiential learning.
• Personnel. The Director or Principal Investigator of the field school must be a registered RPA.
• Operational Procedure. The field school must include formal instruction on field techniques including excavation, survey, and laboratory work.
• Field Procedure. The field school must include proper data recovery and recording techniques.
• Sponsor. The sponsoring institution must provide appropriate resources for laboratory work, curation, and publication/distribution of the research.

PROGRAM QUALIFICATIONS & REQUIREMENTS

1.       The Director or Principal Investigator (PI) of the field program must be RPA-certified by the beginning of the field school program. The Director or PI should have primary responsibility for direct supervision of field school participants in the field and in the laboratory.

2.       The Register of Professional Archaeologists realizes that field school research programs include a wide variety of research objectives, field methods, and differing theoretical perspectives. For that reason, we do not list a set of procedures that all field schools must follow. We do, however, require a basic criterion of standards to be met for certification if they employ particular field methods.

3.       Field school duration has a direct influence on the education and training process; therefore, we rank field schools in three distinct categories through our evaluation:

Certification level	Basic criteria met	A minimum of 20 days of field and/or combined lab work	Prerequisite course(s) required
RPA-Introductory	✓
RPA-4	✓	✓
RPA-4P	✓	✓	✓

4.       All field schools are expected to produce a report summarizing their findings within one (1) calendar year of the end date of the field school. Reports must be produced for each year a field school is conducted. The report should be accessible to the research community.

5.       To be considered for RPA certification, field school directors must submit an Online Application,  and complete all required fields. There is a processing fee of $50 USD.

6.       Field schools will be certified for two years. Re-certification after the end of the second certification year will require the submission of a new application form.