Archaeology is one of the four integrated sub-disciplines of anthropology and is the scientific study of the ancient and recent human past through the material traces of past human activity. Students in every archaeologically-focused course engage in hands-on learning at places where people lived. Research questions include: who lived here, when did they live here, and what can we learn about the lived experiences of people at this place? Students learn about archaeology by doing the work of professional archaeologists. Sites are surveyed, documented, interpreted. Documentary records (e.g., archives, geneaologies) and oral histories are investigated. Students create new knowledge of the past and share this knowledge with public land managers (e.g., the US Forest Service) and the public. Courses themes are time, space, patterns, and telling untold stories.  

Students can also learn about dendroclimatology - the study of past climates, especially precipitation (before weather station records), derived from tree-rings. In the course "Trees, Climate, and People" students extract tree cores, measure rings widths, and retrodict past annual rainfall levels hundreds of years into the past. Our dendroclimate lab is within the archaeology lab. With an anthropological approach, research questions are focused on the relationship between climate extremes and human behavior.