November 29, 2000
Participants:
James Peoples, Department of Sociology/Anthropology
Tom Green, Associate Director of Libraries and Head of Public Services
Rationale
In our recent accreditation document, the Sociology/Anthropology Department
mentioned that we hoped to introduce three new courses into our curriculum:
Society and Economy (Smith), Native American Cultures of the Southwest (Peoples),
and Archaeology and Prehistory (Peoples). The first course (SOAN 200.1) will
be taught this coming spring and the second (SOAN 290.1) was first taught in
spring 2000 and will again be offered in spring 2001. The present proposal is
a step towards creating the third course, Archaeology and Prehistory, a topic
that numerous students (and several prospectives) have inquired about in recent
years. The proposed course will be titled Problems in Human Prehistory.
This course will focus on two of the main issues in the field of prehistoric
archaeology: 1) the evolution of agriculture and 2) the origins and
development of ancient civilizations.
Content
It is often said that there were only three major developments that vastly
transformed human societies and cultures, resulting in new forms of economies,
polities, and ideologies: 1) the development of plant cultivation, 2) the
growth of cities, states, and civilizations, and 3) the industrial revolution.
(Future generations may add the information revolution!) Historians and other
social scientists deal mainly with the last, but prehistorians and
anthropologists have given most attention to the other two. We propose to
integrate information literacy into a course that investigates the origins and
evolution of agriculture and prehistoric civilizations. After a couple of weeks
of sessions that introduce the main archaeological techniques of excavation and
dating, the course will turn to the origins of agriculture (four to five weeks)
and then to the development of civilization (five to six weeks). The
substantive material will emphasize both the facts (what happened, when,
where) and the theories (how, why) about the two transformations. An
outline will serve as a brief overview of the content of the two main topics:
For each of the two problems, a single monograph that overviews the essential factual and theoretical material will be read by all students, and lectures will synthesize the material. Then students will pursue their own geographical interests (e.g., one or more will research Aztec in detail, others Indus). Written assignments, oral reports, and classroom discussions will follow.
Information Literacy Component
For purposes of the proposed course, we consider information literacy as the
ability to recognize the kinds of information needed to address the two problems,
to organize the information into the categories necessary to access it, to
actually retrieve the information, to evaluate it critically, and to utilize it
to address problems and issues. For this course, there are three major sources
of information that students will organize, retrieve, evaluate, and utilize:
Print sources: e.g., popular magazines and other media, technical/professional
journals, monographs, reference works, government documents
On-line sources: e.g., internet sites posted by educational institutions,
governments, private companies (archaeological consulting firms), professional
archaeologists
Databases and full-text sources: e.g., JSTOR, Anthropological Literature,
Lexis-Nexis, Sociological Abstracts, other on-line journals
Information literacy will be integrated into the course by the following procedure. For each of the two problems, every student will be required to access at least one kind information from each of the three major sources. Thus, at minimum, each student will submit six assignments involving instruction in information literacy. In addition to these assignments, classroom instruction by both of us will be provided in: the nature of scholarly information and communication (e.g., distinction between popular media and peer-reviewed journals, primary and secondary sources); the structure of data bases: categories and procedures of information retrieval for each source; subject searching and accessing both local and remote library materials; and the evaluation of sources (e.g., qualifications of web page hosts, bias of authors, reliability and validity of information subtle distinctions between factual and interpretive statements). To make all this possible, the class size must be kept to between 15 and 20. Some class sessions will necessarily be held in a computer lab. There will be no prerequisites.