Blackwater Draw: Turning Student Research into Public Outreach

Summary

Blackwater Draw is known world-wide as the type-site for Clovis culture— the first demonstrable evidence of humans hunting mammoths in the New World. However, as a resource of Eastern New Mexico University, Blackwater Draw is also a valuable tool for creating connections between student research and community engagement. Students participate in internships, directed studies, and use the varied components of the site to write their undergraduate capstone papers and graduate theses. Through these original research initiatives students have built a compelling archive of material that is being offered to the community in new and exciting ways. With projects as diverse as teaching trunk programs, re-imagined visual media, and geoarchaeological studies ranging from stream channel to wind tunnel, these students are changing the way that we connect with our community. Their work comprises a large component of the new initiative of Blackwater Draw, an initiative focused on emphasizing to the world outside our professional circles that the study of archaeology is not some arcane and exclusive profession. Rather, archaeology is an inclusive study of what makes us all human, a study that allows us to draw connections between the past and the present.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20024