Summer Courses and Field Schools 2014

Field Schools:

The Department of Anthropology offers several field schools throughout the year in both Archaeology and Sociocultural Anthropology.  Field experience is important for any student who wishes to pursue these subjects academically or professionally after college or graduate school.

 

Archaeology in Annapolis

Dr. Leone’s field school in Annapolis is a unique and exciting opportunity to participate in a long term study of our nation’s history through uncovering the past.  Begun in 1981, the Archaeology in Annapolis project has been concerned with promoting better understandings of Annapolis’ diverse past through the interpretation of material culture to promote an inclusive form of Annapolis’ history. Over the past 20 years Archaeology in Annapolis has run an annual field school in urban archaeology and has excavated over forty sites throughout the city’s historic district.

 

Materiality of the Irish Immigrant Laborer: Field School in Historical Archaeology

Students can be a part of field school excavations at the site of a laboring settlement of Irish immigrant families and is one of the first to be excavated in Virginia. The work will provide much needed data to create a material history of the daily lives of the Irish men, women, and children laboring and living in the area. Students will be actively situated in learning how to do archaeology and conduct historical research that will provide an intimate understanding of the 19th century Irish immigrant presence outside of urban areas.

 

Brazil Anthropology: Environmental Conservation and Indigenous Peoples

Dr. Chernela's six-credit course will consider conservation and development from the standpoints of local communities and conservationists. The objectives of the field course are to gain an understanding of: socio-economic dynamics of the Amazonian frontier and drivers of deforestation; tropical forest biology with special attention to regeneration; forest-dependent indigenous and local cultures and their struggle to determine the future of the land and communities that depend upon it. This exciting course will be held in Brazil.

 

Lattimer Archaeology Project: The Archaeology of Labor Heritage in a Coal Mining Company Town

In the summer of 2012, Penn State Hazleton and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Maryland will collaborate on an archaeological project exploring life in a coal mining company patch town

near Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Lattimer, was founded in the mid-19th century by the Pardee Company and was the site of a tragic labor massacre in September of 1897. Please contact Michael Roller at mroller@umd.edu for info on the field school, or check our website as we update our logistics.

 

Field School in Applied Ethnography in Jamaica

This 5-week intensive short course is led by Professor Whitehead, and supported with guest lectures and training support by colleagues at the University of the West Indies in Kingston. Components of the field school include the following: (1) a classroom component focused on training students in basic ethnographic methods of natural inquiry (secondary and literature analysis, observation, participant observation, and informal and semi-structured interviews); (2) internship activities with a Jamaican Non-Governmental Organization focusing on various health or social issues in Jamaica (e.g., adolescent sexual and reproductive health issues, crime and violence, etc.); (3) and ethnographic fieldwork carried out predominantly in the cities of Kingston, and three days in Ocho Rios (focused on the ethnography of tourism).