Summer SAVY 2017, Session 5/Day 3- Archaeological Adventures (Rising 2nd/3rd)

Posted by morganr1 on Wednesday, July 19, 2017 in SAVY.

How can it be the end of Day 3 already? Today was a really challenging day, but we learned some really important lessons about archaeology that we will apply to our mock excavations. First, we reviewed some of the big questions we have been discussing all week. For example, why is archaeology important? This may seem like a silly question, but it’s one that a lot of people have trouble answering. I was really happy to find that several of the students remembered that one of the key reasons archaeology is important is for understanding how humans all over the world have ADAPTED to changes in their environments and living situations. We can use this information to help modern-day people adapt to things like climate change, economic collapse, and environmental disasters. We spent the rest of the morning talking about stratigraphy in archaeology. We completed a challenging activity where students were required to match up archaeological dates with mock stratigraphy from a fictional archaeological site. Then, we worked as a group to answer questions as to how understanding the stratigraphy of a site can help us to understand human adaptation. This was frustrating for some of the students, but in the end, everyone had a much better understanding of how archaeologists understand how people change and adapt through time!

Tomorrow, we will be working as real-life archaeologists all morning as we excavate our mock archaeological sites!

Ms. Phyllis Johnson