Thursday, December 04, 2008

Archaelogies of tomorrow?

Last week, the students in my "Archaeological Methods" class presented preliminary versions of their final papers in poster format. I opted to have them play around with this presentation method since posters are becoming increasingly popular in professional conferences and especially because I think they give the presenter the opportunity to get more and more direct feedback on their work. Also, having them present posters as part of a class on archaeology gives them a 'taste' of what a real-life professional academic experience might actually be. And, upon seeing the posters as I was uploading them to the course website, A Very Remote Wife Indeed (wow, that sounds terrible, will need to find some other way to refer to her) quite justly observed that they all looked very sharp and very professional. I could only concur.

In any case, since I was really impressed with the breadth of topics my students decided to cover, I figured I'd post here the titles of their papers in order to give the AVRPI readership an idea of what young minds interested in archaeology are coming up with these days. Here they are, in the order in which they were presented in class:

  1. Interpreting Gendered Social Identities Using Archaeological Evidence: The Canadian West Coast

  2. Intraregional Analysis of Bronze Age Burials in Scotland

  3. Remote Sensing in Archaeology: UAV-Based Aerial Photography

  4. The Calico Early Man Site: Artifacts or Geofacts?

  5. Division of Labour in Relation to Gender in the Folsom Tradition

  6. Uncovering the "Lost Sisterhood": Historical Archaeology in the Red-Light District of Los Angeles, California

  7. Uncharted Waters: Problems with the Chronology of Underwater Archaeological Sites in Florida

  8. Ancient DNA and the Archaeology of Disease: Pathogen DNA from Archaeological Remains Provides a Definitive Diagnosis

  9. The Norte Chico and Chavin Civilizations of Peru

  10. Graeco-Thracian Relations in the Classical Period

  11. Nasca, Peru: Its Pottery and Culture

  12. Middle and Upper Paleolithic Burial Analysis: Implications for Neanderthal Cognitive Thought

  13. Comparison of Archaeological Techniques Applied to Prehistoric and Forensic Contexts

  14. A Comparative Analysis of the Monumental Archaeology of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) Moai and the Afghan Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley