Investigating Climatic Dimensions of the Archaeological Past with Undergraduates Using CADGAP (Climatic Analogs Data Gathering Project)

Summary

Bryson and Murray’s (1979) Climates of Hunger ignited my interest in climate change and human cultural discontinuities over time. Later, as a junior faculty in an undergraduate institution fostering collaborative research between faculty and students, I was encouraged to share my climate-related research methodology with my students. This led to development of a teaching strategy that integrates the study of climate change into the anthropology curriculum in two specific courses, one oriented toward the past (archaeology) and the other looking at future issues (cultural ecology). In these courses, students use weather data from specific sites in an assigned world region to do trend analyses to speculate on past or future climatic conditions. I developed the acronym CADGAP (Climatic Analogs Data Gathering Project) to indicate which classes would employ that strategy. This paper discusses the pedagogical methodologies involved in bringing CADGAP into the classroom over more than two decades. It also will address the increasing challenges encountered in accessing the data needed to successfully implement this active learning process.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Abstract Id(s): 21151