How to Make Your Own (Archaeological) Book Club

Welcome to the Alexandria Archive Institute and Open Context‘s Data Story Shorts! Here in How to Make Your Own (Archaeological) Book Club we explain how we selected and created our Aggregative Series book club Data Stories. Reading and discussion—which we consider ways to read, work with, and communicate data—are essential for all archaeology learners.

With that in mind, this Data Story Short explains how you can adapt the book club format to cultivate your own archaeological data literacy. That means that rather than recommend specific books, this guide will help you create your own archaeology or archaeological data literacy-focused book club guide, appropriate for your next class, next book club meeting, or just for fun!

Why book clubs?

Book clubs, rather than reading solo, are an excellent scaffold for archaeological data literacy because they build on the main skills we associate with literacy, the ability to read and retain information. Furthermore, language—verbal, auditory, written, or depicted—is often the first kind of structured data that we interact with.

On top of that, book clubs rely on communicating insights between people, making data literacy a social act. By reading works written for the public and having those publics explore archaeology-related observations through the social act of discussion, book clubs help people cultivate multiple archaeological data literacy components.

We focus on doing this through books because, in the rush for big data and other technology-oriented frameworks, we often forget that words themselves—including grammar and sentence structure—are data. While these evolve into technological skills (which we provide avenues to develop within the book club Data Stories), our ability to engage with more complicated literacies always relies on the ability to read.

Book clubs also involve the other components of data literacy—working with, analyzing, arguing, and communicating—because discussion requires us to go through all those steps. Whenever we respond to or talk about books, we have to work with the data those books provide, see the patterns they reflect, consider how to make a particular point, and then assess if the audience understood that point.

Beyond data literacy, the books recommended in our clubs align with other values of the Data Literacy Program, as introduced in the article Listicles and Literacy – The Aggregative Series to promote data literacy. These include availability and accessibility in multiple formats (print, ebook, or audiobook) and through local public libraries, inter-library loan, or for inexpensive purchase.

We also highlight diversity in authors and the formats that they write and create in by having multiple book club Data Stories that focus on different kinds of books. Lastly, we actively reflected and wrote about the creators we chose to include in these lists, why, and the existing barriers to finding books that aligned with our values to be transparent about our process.

We hope this Data Story Short and those articles help you consider the values you hope to share through your book club or anything you create when inspired by our Data Stories!

How can I do this myself?

Putting together a book list and discussion guide can seem like a daunting task if you’ve never done it before (it was for us). However, most people are familiar with thematic book lists (“Best Beach Reads of 2024!”). While usually not archaeology focused, we’ve seen the things we liked and disliked in those lists and can adapt them in ways that appeal to us as the first audience.

In this guide, we hope to make the process less daunting by explaining how we (the DLP) did it and then outline how you can create each component yourself. Here, we expand on methods introduced in our current book club Data Stories and provide additional references we found for existing archaeology book groups and reading lists. Hopefully you enjoyed the books and discussion guides in our Aggregative Series Data Stories enough to draw from them as inspiration. But, everyone makes book clubs a little differently, so all you need to make your own is an interest in archaeology.

With that in mind, here’s a summary of how we found these books and our suggestions on expanding these lists or making your own. In each of the following sections, we begin with a brief introduction of how the DLP went through that step. We then explain how we executed that task, drawing on our experiences from the book club Data Stories. After that, we include a section of generalized tips and resources we found that might help.

Finding good books

Finding good books for your community to start or expand a book club starts with defining the scope of that club. This could involve defining the scope based on the community or audience that you are making the guide for, the content you want to teach or learn about, or the format that you’d want to learn or teach that content through. Regardless of what feature you choose, this will guide how you find good books.

Because the mission of the DLP is to cultivate archaeological data literacy, we started with content as our guide when we searched for books. After content, for us, was accessibility in terms of cost and format. While we care a lot about archaeological data literacy, we’re also committed to teaching people that archaeological data literacy doesn’t require paying lots of money and that its cultivation is about more than technological literacy. This led us to recommendations from colleagues, online web searches, and library subject searches for books that related to archaeological data literacy. Once we had three or four books, we explored the themes those books shared, solidified those into our discussion themes or questions, and then sought additional books that fit those themes and questions.

We also needed to incorporate archaeological data—also part of the mission of the program—and wanted to ensure that we intentionally incorporated various types of diversity into our recommendations. When searching for books, we focused on works whose authors came from diverse backgrounds or whose material engaged with archaeological data literacy in a diverse way. We then used our program values to explore the possible books we’d include. Admittedly, this sometimes meant looking for authors or characters from diverse backgrounds first and then exploring whether they made reference to archaeological knowledge in a meaningful way.

This initial search became the adult nonfiction list for Of Mycenaean Men. Our first recommended books coalesced around popular nonfiction and science books because we focused on “archaeology” and “data” as our main searches. Realizing that, we considered how cool it would be to explore archaeology in fiction and then comics as a unique way to develop multiple literacies. You can read more about the development of each book club Data Story on their own pages at:

A Pun Goes Here: The AAI Reads Fiction Book Club

Tome Reader: The AAI Reads Comics Book Club

Of Mycenaean Men: The Public Archaeology Book Club

Broad suggestions for locating good books

It’s important to identify the audience, content, or format that defines the scope of your search. For Of Mycenaean Men and A Pun Goes Here, content was our primary driver in selecting books. However, for Tome Reader we focused on format because of the unique and advantageous literacies developed through reading comic books. Here we provide a series of considerations to help you narrow your scope and some suggestions for places to look for or people to ask about good books.

Considerations

1. Consider and list the values you or your group hold that you want to advocate for with these books. These will guide the purpose of the book club or list.
2. Narrow your scope by considering and deciding your:
   1. Content
   2. Audience
   3. Format
3. Think about books you’ve recently read (or have been recommended to you) that match that narrowed scope and the values or purpose of the list.
4. Once you’ve got at least three that fit the scope, values, and purpose of the list, consider the themes present in those books, such as:
   1. What did you like?
   2. What didn’t you like?
   3. What connects the books?
   4. What divides them?
5. Pick which of these themes are most important to your values, purpose, and scope and use those to continue your search for more works.
6. Decide how many books your list will contain and reevaluate if you’ve met that goal. Then,
   1. read some of the new books and consider if they still meet the values, purpose, and scope of your list.
   2. remove books that might not fit and retain books that you think will work well with the group.
   3. explore the themes in all the books and then group them. Use these subthemes to guide reading order or alternative approaches to the book club.
   4. consider making an “extras” or “read next” list if your pile of potential books exceeds your goal.

Suggested resources to look through

1. Digital Data Story book lists
2. Florida Public Archaeology Network – North Central Region’s “Archaeology Books for Fun” Podcast
3. Archaeology in the Community’s suggested reading list (K-12)
4. Your local librarian or library-related friend or colleague
5. Book records through your local library catalog,
   1. For this, search for the books you already know you want to include in your local library catalog, database, or app. See what they’re subject-tagged or cataloged as and explore those. Books that fit your theme may be tagged or cataloged differently than you expect, so searching by those (rather than keywords) can lead you to new works. If the books are nonfiction, you can do something similar by looking for books assigned similar call numbers within your local library if you’d like to look in person.
   2. We recommend libraries over companies’ tags and cataloging because libraries, while they pull some information algorithmically, spend much more time checking the accuracy of their records than retailers.
6. Library databases with ancillary information, such as those focused on specific topics.
   1. NoveList is an example of this. This EBSCOHost database collates a lot of cool information but usually requires a public library login to access. NoveList spends a lot of time on the data they curate so their database is a great way to get additional information about books, such as about authors and their backgrounds.

Writing discussion questions

When the DLP thought about good discussion questions for the books included in our clubs we thought about them in stages. Though, not necessarily in the order you’d expect. We first phrased each of the themes for the book club (which you’ll come up with when you select your books) as questions. This provided each club a starting point for the kinds of questions that the group would address. These were broad and approachable for most adult readers (as our initial target age-group). Groups focused on younger audiences should ensure thematic questions are tailored to the age-group you’re working with.

We then jumped straight into questions about the individual books. These were easiest for us to write immediately after we read the books, while we still had them fresh in our minds. We wrote some while we read or reviewed the books to see what themes popped out at us. For these, we focused on writing with the archaeology-related themes or material in the book in mind, sometimes explicitly asking questions about the data within them. Unintentionally, this meant that the questions for the individual books require familiarity with archaeology to engage with and were more technical than we initially expected, something our wonderful peer reviewers pointed out!

This is where our last types of questions came in, ones between broad and technical. These were the questions we wrote while assembling the Data Story guides. These were questions that we considered relevant to all the books in each list. Because of that, they’re open ended and similar between the different book clubs. We wrote these questions by considering ways to get a conversation started about the books and relate that conversation back to the values we had for our Data Stories (such as about the relationship between data and storytelling or diversity in archaeology).

This is how we ended up with the different kinds of questions we included in the Data Stories. We’re extremely grateful to our peer reviewers for pointing out some of the ways we could better organize these for different kinds of audiences and we used those suggestions to improve them before release!

Key elements for discussion questions

While our journey to discussion questions is illustrative, we don’t recommend it. Instead, we suggest a more systematic approach. Like with the books you’ve selected, it’s important to identify your audience and content-focus when writing discussion questions.

Because the goal of the DLP was to cultivate archaeological data literacy, we focused on questions that explored books from a data-centric lens. However, this created a pretty academic tone for most of our book-tailored discussion questions. When this was pointed out to us, we saw that the other questions we included (the thematic questions and guiding questions for all books) were less technical. So we reorganized our Data Stories to better make use of those questions as discussion resources and specified their value for different audiences.

So you don’t make the same mistake, we encourage people to think about their audience first and leave content or format second. The point of the questions is to get the group to engage with the material, so if you don’t consider them first you’ll probably have to do a lot of revision (like we did). A good way to start is to consider the age of the group you’re working with and then their level of familiarity with archaeology. This will guide how you should phrase the questions and what they will feel confident discussing. After that, approach format and content by considering what kinds of questions your group responds well to, how they like to discuss or work through difficult concepts, and then, what the specific content was that they wanted to or that you wanted them to learn about or discuss.

Considerations

• Who is the audience of this book group?
  • What age are they? How familiar are they with archaeology? (Assuming this is part of your book group goal).
  • Is your goal for them to answer the question and get it “right” or to prompt discussion amongst members?
• Is there a particular thing (such as a learning or knowledge objective) you want the group to talk about with regard to the books or within a specific book?
• What kind of questions have you, as part of this group, noticed people respond to?
  • Do they prefer specific questions or broad themes to discuss? Do they bring their own questions that they’d like to ask?
    • Are those questions information-based or meant to prompt more discussion?
  • Write a few questions for yourself and then ask each participant to bring one question of their own (if developing this over time rather than all at once).
• Write “extreme” questions to get people talking and engaging with the book’s content. These sorts of questions or phrases often get discussion going to oppose or support a particularly stark point.
• Write questions with different scales, going from broad to detailed or from detailed to broad, to approach the content in different ways.
• Write questions that nest within or build on one another, such as ones that deal with the content in fundamental to complex or complex to fundamental way, considering the trees and then the forest or the forest then the trees.
• Have someone outside your group read through the questions to get feedback on them in case you’ve missed something important, accidentally repeated a question, or posed them in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Suggested resources for discussion questions

1. The Digital Data Stories‘  book club discussion guides
2. The books themselves
   1. Some books now have a book club edition that will include questions cultivated for the book, check those out to see if they address the information you’re interested in. These may be on the authors’ website or on the publisher’s website when you search for the title. You can also look for books related to the book you’re interested in to see what kind of questions others have posed for those books to see if they are relevant.
3. Ask your local librarian or library-related friend or colleague who facilitates book groups how they prepare for book clubs and what kind of questions they bring, if any.
4. Look up any content creators (newspapers, podcasts, videos, social media, etc.) that have worked with or reviewed your book and then shared their experiences to see what themes they thought were important to discuss.
   1. Incorporate those reviews as part of the discussion, asking participants whether they agree or disagree with the review creators’ points.

Locating related resources

The last part of this guide explains how we located further resources for each book. This process was unique for each Data Story as the materials we found (though not endorse) differed widely with each book and book club. Overall, we saw the related resources as a chance to connect readers with materials that potentially expanded on or responded to the information provided by the books. These act as stepping stones for readers to learn more about the archaeological elements of each work.

The idea of related resources began while we filmed the book videos for Of Mycenaean Men. We hoped the recommendations within those videos would provide watchers with more works to explore if they had already read the book we were discussing. It was also a chance for us to include references to work we discussed within the videos that were not the main book. In those videos, we recommended other works of nonfiction, fiction, music, and other materials that we felt reflected the book in some way. We recommended a lot of fiction and other media because the books—as non-fiction focused on archaeology and data—were already data literacy oriented.

Once we had these for Of Mycenaean Men, we thought it would be valuable to include something similar for the other two book lists as well. To provide users with another book to read, if they liked the first one, we found a book related to the content in the related resources. These were either the next book in a series, a book in a similar vein by the same author, or works unrelated but that shared something with the book we recommended in the list.

We also included these because, although we strived for the books to be relatively new, or at least easy to find, and therefore in print, we know that the works on any of the lists might go out of print. That meant we saw these first works as alternatives to our suggestions in case the primary book wasn’t accessible. However, these are potential alternatives and some may not work as well as the initial book we suggested.

After further reads, we looked for real archaeological data or resources that explicitly discussed archaeology related to the content of the book. We did this because some of the works’ archaeological relationships were less obvious so we wanted to connect readers with potentially relevant sources. To find these resources, we used our own search terms and related resources—such as Open Context, tDAR, ADS, and other archaeology-related organizations—to find associated data, projects, and other works. We also utilized the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage maps and tools to find archaeological sites all over the world.

Once we found resources, we included ones based on whether they came from reliable sources, seemed to relate well with the themes of the book as we understood them, and if they appealed to us as readers of the books ourselves. However, these resources are all places to potentially find out more. This means that if the related resources don’t seem like they fit to you, let us know! We’re always looking for good new resources and we’re happy to update or add those to our data tables about the books.

Connecting communities with good resources

Once you’ve finished the book yourself, think about what other materials the work reminded you of. Was there a soundtrack that played in your head, a documentary that talked about the same topic, or did you immediately put the next book in the series on hold?

While these first resources might not always appeal to the other members of your book club, they can get you energized about searching for more. At this stage, we recommend going on a Wiki-rabbit-hole style dive to learn more and decide what might be useful for your group. Once you’ve got a good list, go skim through them to see how they align with the book club audience and the values of the book group. For example, if you’ve a giant list of video games but you’re the only archaeogamer in your group, it might be good to search for other options.

As the facilitator and maker of the guide, it’s important to consider why you’re picking these materials. Are they appealing to you or do they fit something about the group you’re making this for? Will these materials get the group more interested in the topics they wanted to talk about or are they discussion deadends? Our guide is for a broad audience, so we included some pretty general resources. You probably know your group better so you can be more specific. Related resources are also a great chance to put back into your guide the books you left out. While they didn’t make sense to include on the initial list, they might be great resources for members of your group looking for related books or materials to learn more.

Considerations

• What other materials did the book remind you of? What are the similarities and differences with the materials, what themes do they contain?
• Do the discussions you normally have focus on wanting to learn more about archaeology, learn more about a specific topic within archaeology, or about communicating through a specific medium?
• Is the group interested in communicative media beyond books that might get them to engage with the archaeological content better?
• What materials might the book club be interested in based on their stated goals, interests, and previous experiences?
  • Do movies, video games, videos, or music come up regularly in discussion?
  • Who are the creators that get referenced regularly?
  • Do they have any materials you could relate back to the books in your reading list?
• What themes did the books in the list not engage with and are there resources you can find that might fill in gaps in the reading list or expand on those ideas in new ways?
• Do you want your group to search more for themselves or have materials on hand to help them?

Suggested resources to find more…resources

1. The suggested resources listed under Finding good books
   1. These are great for finding books to read after you’ve finished the ones already on the list.
2. The Of Mycenaean Men – Part Two: The Open Context Keyword Search Tutorial
   1. This will help you learn to search using keywords on Open Context and find open archaeological data potentially related to your books.
3. It’s All in the Wrist (Bones): Archaeological Data as Artistic Inspiration
   1. This can help you learn to search by Data Publication on Open Context to find whole open archaeological data publications potentially relevant to your books.
4. 30 Days to an Article: Archaeological Inspiration For Your Writing
   1. This includes a list of other sources for archaeological information and data that you  can search to find further resources.
5. The UNESCO World Heritage List
   1. This is the whole world heritage list and searching it can help you locate specific sites or regions that your group might be interested in learning more about.
6. Archaeogaming –  a blog dedicated to archaeogaming with potential resources to reference as another medium that engages with archaeological data.
   1. If you’ve not heard of this before, check out Wikipedia for a good definition and some background on archaeogaming.

Concluding thoughts

Thank you so much for reading through this Data Story Short. We hope this helps you make your own book club or inspires you to learn more about the works you’ve already read, finding new ways to engage with the material. As part of our concluding thoughts, we want to acknowledge that we didn’t include sections on how we selected search terms and noted content warnings in the book club Data Stories.

This is because we chose to recommend search terms in our book clubs so that our users could cultivate data literacy skills related to search. However, that’s not the goal of every book club. So we suggest facilitators let search terms come up organically while folks read or as they come up during discussion. When we don’t understand something, or want to know more, we often search it immediately to satisfy that curiosity. And that’s pretty easy to do on personal technology or in a physical dictionary. Therefore, we leave the creation or inclusion of search terms up to book club facilitators to decide if features like that make sense for their groups and the goals of those meetings.

As for content warnings, the DLP noted trigger warnings for most of the books on our lists as we read, guided by the terms we saw used on trigger warning sites. A few of the books we recommend had additional tags that we incorporated from crowdsourced sites like Book Trigger Warnings and the Trigger Warning Database, as noted by the superscripts BTW or TWD in an individual book’s entry and a citation to those pages. Another source for such warnings can be authors’ pages, if they happened to include trigger warnings for their own books.

At this time, the tagging of content and trigger warnings is an ongoing process across media, with new ones added or modified through time. That means that any list, including ours and the ones listed on those sites or by authors, will be incomplete. We hope that others interested in including such tags or notes in their guides will take the time to add them to their book lists from such places, add them themselves, or point their users to relevant resources. But because content and trigger warnings are, at this time, predominately a crowd-sourced process we’d rather folks look at sites that focus on that process to learn more.

So, don’t hesitate to let us know if we forgot any tags or incorrectly tagged any of the books in our Data Stories. We’re always looking to improve our resources. Or, if you have any suggestions for further resources on any of the topics included in this short, please reach out. We’re always looking for new materials to share! Thanks for using this Data Story Short and happy reading!

References and further reading

These references are listed in order of appearance in the text or are suggestions for further reading on the topics presented or related material. If any URLs navigate to a broken page, please check the Wayback Machine for an archived copy of the material.

Explore some data publications over at Open Context: opencontext.org

Check out other Digital Data Stories here: https://doi.org/10.6078/M74F1NW0

If you want to learn a bit more about the program values of the DLP Check out “Literacy = People”: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2021/04/09/literacy-equals-people/

“Listicles and Literacy – The Aggregative Series to promote data literacy” by Paulina F. Przystupa (2023) https://alexandriaarchive.org/2023/03/02/3880/

Read our reflection on the book club processes way for including diverse authors in “Demographics and Data Stories”: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2022/07/08/demographics-and-data-stories/

Read our reflection on the barriers to writing popular science in “Who writes popular science?” and our struggles to put together diverse reading lists at: https://alexandriaarchive.org/2022/03/30/who-writes-popular-science/

Learn about the mission of the DLP at: https://doi.org/10.6078/M70P0X5P

A Pun Goes Here: The AAI Reads Fiction Book Club by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2024) https://doi.org/10.6078/M7PZ56Z5

Tome Reader: The AAI Reads Comics Book Club by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2025) https://doi.org/10.6078/M7K64G75

Check out Of Mycenaean Men: The Public Archaeology Book Club by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2023) at: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7M61HCJ

Find the Florida Public Archaeology Network – North Central Region’s “Archaeology Books for Fun” Podcast on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@floridapublicarchaeologyne4125/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1

Find Archaeology in the communities reading list at: https://www.archaeologyincommunity.com/suggested-reading-list.html

You can learn more about the work and data created by NoveList at: https://www.ebsco.com/novelist

An example of a book with its own discussion questions is Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants available at: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass

Check out our book blurb videos at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqLKQATGIck&list=PLhjqAN1yrR07iPyOZsxuJUdgJGhUXFa-2

Learn more about archaeogaming broadly over at Wikipedia and see the DLP’s own L. Meghan Dennis quoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeogaming

You can find Of Mycenaean Men’s Open Context Keyword Search Tutorial at: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7TX3CHJ

It’s All in the Wrist (Bones): Archaeological Data as Artistic Inspiration by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2023) https://doi.org/10.6078/M7N877XP

30 Days to an Article: Archaeological Inspiration For Your Writing by Paulina F. Przystupa and L. Meghan Dennis (2023) https://doi.org/10.6078/M7HH6H6C

Check out UNESCO World Heritage sites at: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/

You can check out the Archaeogaming blog here: https://archaeogaming.com/about/

You can also find references to real archaeological articles, data, and other resources over at the Digital Archaeological Record also known as tDAR: https://core.tdar.org/

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has more reports over at: https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/

Search the books you might include on Book Trigger Warnings or the Trigger Warning Database to find and include those in your guide: https://booktriggerwarnings.com/ and https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/

The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Gain access to any broken links by getting an archived copy from the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/

Credits

Unless otherwise specified, this work and its components are shared under a CC BY license. To attribute this Data Story or any of its parts, please use our suggested citation:

Paulina F. Przystupa, 2025, “How to Make Your Own (Archaeological) Book Club,” Data Stories Program, Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context, Published Online, DOI: https://doi.org/10.6078/M7K072DH

“AAI-OC_DataStoryPublished_Header-HowToBookClub” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the Data Literacy Program (DLP) / CC BY. It includes an adaptation of “AAI Reads Logo” by Paulina F. Przystupa, which is an adaptation of an Adobe stock image. All other images included in this text were altered from royalty-free pieces obtained from the Noun Project (https://thenounproject.com/) through subscription.

Acknowledgements

This is Version 1.0, published January 2025, and at this time this page has not been updated since initial publication. Updates and changes will be noted here if this page changes.  

The author would like to thank AAI staff for reading the drafts of this Data Story Short and Librarian Alenka Figa their suggestion of NoveList as a useful database for identifying new reads. We’re also very grateful for the ongoing crowdsourcing efforts at Book Trigger Warnings and Trigger Warning Database that provided comprehensive warnings for some books and guidance on warnings to add to books that lacked representation on those pages.