Post by mirium on Oct 29, 2009 20:21:22 GMT -5
That's what I had to ask when I saw a couple dozen people, each with a clipboard, slowly wandering about a little plaza while staring intensely at the ground.
Turned out they were all students in an Archeology class that met inside that building, except for the guy who came over and answered my question -- he was the professor. The plaza had big square paving stones, about a yard or a meter on a side, and was about 20 x 15 stones -- a natural grid. Their assignment was to treat the plaza like an archeology site, noting everything they found on the ground (including mysterious bits of goo), and they were going to go back and try to reconstruct the culture from the, err, artifacts they'd found. And no cheating! They're not allowed to use their "special insider knowledge" to interpret the stuff.
The prof said it really opened their eyes about how hard it is to reconstruct the past, and each semester they came up with a different scenario about the culture that left the evidence, except for one thing. Every time, they came to the conclusion that "they're really messy."
Turned out they were all students in an Archeology class that met inside that building, except for the guy who came over and answered my question -- he was the professor. The plaza had big square paving stones, about a yard or a meter on a side, and was about 20 x 15 stones -- a natural grid. Their assignment was to treat the plaza like an archeology site, noting everything they found on the ground (including mysterious bits of goo), and they were going to go back and try to reconstruct the culture from the, err, artifacts they'd found. And no cheating! They're not allowed to use their "special insider knowledge" to interpret the stuff.
The prof said it really opened their eyes about how hard it is to reconstruct the past, and each semester they came up with a different scenario about the culture that left the evidence, except for one thing. Every time, they came to the conclusion that "they're really messy."