ANTH 280: Of Trowels and Trenches: Introduction to Archaeology (Professor Spenard) [Spring 2022]

Archaeological Site Investigation and CSUSM Archaeology Conference

You and three of your classmates will form a research team and lead an archaeological expedition (through library research) to one of the sites listed below. Through your investigations, you’ll learn more about the history of the site, as well as some of the archaeologists who worked there, and the methods they used to study it. As you learn more about your site, you’ll find that some of the research conducted there has revolutionized the entire field of archaeology either through technological, theoretical, or methodological practices. Some have advanced our knowledge of our shared human past in wildly unimagined ways. Others have been mired in controversy. At least one solves a common “archaeological mystery.”

Here are the sites that the class will be leading research expeditions to this semester:

• Tikal
• Chichén Itzá
• Teotihuacan
• Tiwanaku
• Rising Star Cave, South Africa
• African Burial Ground, New York
• Göbekli Tepe
• Great Zimbabwe
• Easter Island
• Heit el-Ghurab: The worker’s town of the Egyptian pyramids

As with all archaeological research, we must do more than simply investigate, we must also publish and present our research. We’ll be doing both of those activities at the end of the semester during what we are calling the CSUSM Archaeology Conference. The publishing part of the assignment will be for the group to co-author a poster presentation summarizing what they learned about their site. 

For full assignment guidelines, please consult Cougar Courses.