The Role of Experimental Archaeology at the Range Creek Field Station, Utah

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ten years ago, the archaeological field school at the Range Creek Field Station explicitly embarked on a new direction of research. Students continue to receive training in excavation and survey techniques but actualistic experiments were added to the curriculum. The experiments are designed to calculate the costs and benefits associated with exploiting various wild resources, constructing simple surface irrigation systems to farm maize, and building prehistoric storage structures. Combined with techniques for quantifying various aspects of the environment, such as the distribution and seasonality of plant resources that were likely economically important to the prehistoric residents of the canyon, these data provide students and researchers with unique perspectives on past people’s behavior. The Range Creek Field Station offers an ideal setting for reconstructing paleoenvironmental variability and the response of farmers to that changing environment. Taken together, these studies contribute to a comprehensive database addressing the cost/benefits of conducting activities with simple technologies for living in Range Creek prehistorically. The results from each year inform the character of experiments in the following years. We believe that this approach to building an interpretive framework for exploring the archaeology in Range Creek Canyon will be productive and rewarding to student participants.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part II

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39584.0