Portrait of a Project Archaeology Workshop:
Elko, Nevada 2023
GREAT BASIN ARCHAEOLOGY
Workshop staff, fifteen teachers, and special guests gathered at the Bureau of Land Management’s California Trail Interpretive Center (BLM, CTIC) for the three-day event, which featured the Project Archaeology curricula Investigating Shelter and Investigating a Great Basin Wickiup.
The California Trail Interpretive Center, site of the workshop.
Staff were Samantha Kirkley (Project Archaeology/Southern Utah University), Jeanne Moe (Institute for Heritage Education), Virgil Johnson (Goshute Elder and Educator), and Karen Wilson (Institute for Heritage Education). BLM Archaeologist Ryan Brown led the field learning day.
Cooperators included BLM-Nevada (the major funder); CTIC staff (very helpful hosts); Nevada Gold Mines/Native American Affairs (who provided funding and contacted local teachers about the workshop through their communication network); and the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone (who hosted a dinner for the teachers).
Te-Moak artist and educator Leah Brady and the Painted Horse Singers – an Indigenous song and drum group from Owyhee, Nevada – were special guests. Ms. Brady, as a descendant of people who lived in the Great Basin in the past, described the Te-Moak perspective on the lives of their ancestors and the archaeological record they left behind.
A traditional welcome song greeted the teachers as they arrived.
Classroom sessions modeled Project Archaeology materials and methods.
Staff walked the teachers through the lesson sequence of a locally relevant investigation curriculum for students.
A floor map helped teachers visualize a shelter site and draw inferences about the site.
Leah Brady related the Te-Moak tribe’s past and present and demonstrated traditional basketmaking techniques.
The setting of an ancient Elko-area rock shelter, an archaeological site that was the focus of the field learning day.
At a replica wickiup on the CTIC grounds, staff led a “reading the building” activity about its structure. Then Virgil Johnson described the lives of Great Basin Indigenous peoples at the time of Spanish contact.
Teachers applied their observation and inference skills to artifacts they discovered in and around the precontact rock shelter.
At the close of the workshop, staff celebrated 15 more upper elementary and middle school teachers prepared to lead Project Archaeology investigations in the classroom. Hundreds of their students will benefit from learning-by-doing:
The basics of scientific and historical inquiry.
An understanding of the diversity of cultures and our common humanity.
The importance of preserving our cultural and archaeological heritage.