Most of the students in the College of Letters & Science may be away for the summer, but that doesn’t mean the action has stopped on campus. Our faculty and staff are still living out the Wisconsin Idea, both in Madison and all over the world. This is a story in our Summer Snapshots series.
In one class, the students repair an outdoor kiln. A week later, they drill into stone using a variety of techniques. Soon, they’ll be on to firing pottery in the kiln. And by the end of the summer, they’ll have produced a whole range of tools and pieces of art.
Not exactly your typical college course.
It’s Anthropology Professor J. Mark Kenoyer’s Ancient Technology and Invention class, one that provides University of Wisconsin-Madison students with as much hands-on work as they can handle.
The course explores ancient technology through the actual manufacture of tools, art and other products. Kenoyer, one of the world’s leading experts on the ancient Indus Valley Civilization in southern Asia, has taught the class nearly every summer since 1988, as well as in the fall and spring. He says the course is one of a kind.
“There’s nowhere else in the world where this range, from Stone Age to steel, is taught in one course,” Kenoyer says.
Sam Villanueva shapes a bowl out of clay.
The class splits time between a traditional classroom setting and the Department of Anthropology’s Experimental Archaeology Laboratory in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. The small group setting allows for plenty of participation and interaction with Kenoyer.
“This is the ideal archaeology class to really get a handle on how artifacts were made and really appreciate it and then also get how archaeologists study these things,” says Alison Carter (MS’07, Anthropology), a PhD student studying Archaeology.
Students start out by manufacturing stone tools, before moving on to other materials such as wood, antler and bone. They explore bead making and craft pottery, which they fire in a kiln that’s plastered using local clay that the students mix with their bare feet in a pit at the outdoor lab. They learn about glass making and metalworking. Then, to top it all off, they complete a final project that incorporates some form of ancient technology.
Peter Lewis, a junior majoring in anthropology, is making several different types of flutes, while Marcus Moreno, a senior majoring in political science, is examining Ojibwa bead making. Kenoyer isn’t as concerned about the final products as much as the processes the students use to create them.
“It’s more important that they get their hands dirty,” he says. “In the end, you end up having concrete original research.”
Nathan Roy tries out flint knapping at the outdoor lab.
The course tends to attract non-anthropology students like Moreno, in part because it fulfills the Communications B requirement for undergraduates.
“It’s also an outdoor class and is interesting,” Moreno adds.
Kenoyer also has two visiting scholars – Qinglin Li from Wuhan University in China and Shahid Rajput from Islamic International University, Islamabad in Pakistan – sitting in on the course, as well as two local high school students who are serving as interns. It’s another unique aspect to a course that certainly offers students a different experience.
“I didn’t expect us to do this much hands-on work,” Moreno says. “I knew it would be outdoors and what not, but as far as actually making these ancient tools and doing the same techniques, it definitely has exceeded expectations.”