| Education Our educational plans emphasize working with secondary-school children. Beginning in 2003 we will develop a version of the Swarm simulation tailored to the needs of the some 2500 junior-high and high-school-age students who visit Crow Canyon each year. Since we believe that history is only boring when it is abstract and because students do not effect it, the software will be designed to indicate the complexities of coupled human/natural systems very concretely, and to allow students to be active participants in forming alternate histories by generating what-if scenarios. For example, how might the settlement processes be different if the lowest-flow seeps and springs went entirely dry? How would deer—a principal source of protein—be affected if human population size were double that we estimate from the archaeological record? Would the settlement pattern look any different in A.D. 1250 if the initial distribution of households in A.D. 600 is changed? One unanswered question is how much access to the simulation machinery we should allow students. For example, we could allow students to run movies of pre-coded “what-if” questions, or we could allow them to change selected parameters within certain ranges and run the simulation itself. One danger in the latter approach is that the settlement patterns may unfold through time too slowly to be interesting. Graduate student training with this project will generate a Ph.D. dissertation through the Colorado School of Mines (with Kolm) and another through Washington State University (with Kohler), and two master’s theses. Other graduate and undergraduate students will be involved in the empirical aspects of the archaeological research through Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, and with the modeling, through Wayne State and Washington State. Kohler will use versions of these simulations in his graduate class, Anth 547 (Models in Anthropology) at Washington State.
We also have information-sharing components for professionals beyond the
usual publication plans. We will present our methods and results to interested
members of the southwestern archaeological community, and researchers
working in similar settings elsewhere in the world, at an international
conference at the Santa Fe Institute in 2004. That same year we will host
a workshop at the Anasazi Heritage Center, Colorado for resource managers
in the southwestern U.S. where we present our findings and invite their
comments. |