In this 6-part activity, students learn about climate change during the Cenozoic and the abrupt changes at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary (65.5 million years ago), the Eocene/Oligocene boundary (33.9 million years ago), and the Paleocene/Eocene boundary (55.8 million years ago).

This course focuses on the archaeology of the Greek and Roman city. It investigates the relationship between urban architecture and the political, social, and economic role of cities in the Greek and Roman world, by analyzing a range of archaeological and literary evidence relevant to the use of space in Greek and Roman cities (e.g. Athens, Paestum, Rome, Pompeii) and a range of theoretical frameworks for the study of ancient urbanism.

This presentation offers an overview of the developing concept of The Anthropocene -- a term coined to describe our current geological epoch, in which human impact on the planet will leave a permanent trace.

Pomona College -- fall 2022

Word Count: 33688

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This video shows where and how ice cores are extracted from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The cores are cut, packaged, flown to the ice core storage facility in Denver, further sliced into samples, and shipped to labs all over the world where scientists use them to study indicators of climate change from the past.

Short Description:
Laboratory activities in this workbook are presented as chapters each of which could either be highly specialized, or generic. The approach and the level of difficulty will vary based on instructors’ preferences and more importantly availability and quality of the materials and equipment available in the laboratory.

Long Description:
Each laboratory activity follows a lecture which is envisioned to provide additional detailed information (already mostly or partially covered in a textbook assigned by a professor for Biological Anthropology theory course) regarding scheduled topics to be covered in the laboratory by offering further and in-depth guidance needed for the laboratory setting.

Word Count: 5432

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

This 16-week course is an introduction to archaeology through discoveries and the researchers who made them. Emphasis on methods of archaeological fieldwork and what these discoveries reveal about humanity, including the nature of archaeological inquiry, the development of human social groups, the changing role of religion in evolving societies, the origins of agriculture, the origins of settled lifeways, the rise of cities and complex societies, political strife across different cultures and the forces which fragment societies. Examples drawn from North America, Central America, and South America. 

Students are asked to design and conduct an archaeological survey of the modern college campus, focusing on the provenience of litter and other trash, which is collected, sorted, and analyzed. Students develop a research question about college culture, waste management practices, and/or sustainability more generally and prepare an academic poster presenting their results.

This animation depicts global surface warming as simulated by NCAR's Community Climate System Model (CCSM) Version 3. It shows the temperature anomalies relative to the end of the 19th century, both over the entire globe and as a global average. The model shows the temporary cooling effects during 5 major volcanic eruptions and estimates future temperature trends based on different amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

This teaching activity is an introduction to how ice cores from the cryosphere are used as indicators and record-keepers of climate change as well as how climate change will affect the cryosphere.

This activity focuses on reconstructing the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as an example of a relatively abrupt global warming period. Students access Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) sediment core data with Virtual Ocean software in order to display relevant marine sediments and their biostratigraphy.

This Earth Exploration Toolbook chapter is a detailed computer-based exploration in which students learn how various climatic conditions impact the formations of sediment layers on the ocean floor. They analyze sediment core data from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica for evidence of climate changes over time. In addition, they interact with various tools and animations throughout the activity, in particular the Paleontological Stratigraphic Interval Construction and Analysis Tool (PSICAT) that is used to construct a climate change model of a sediment core from core images.

Students will view fossils, sometimes with supporting illustrations, and answer questions about them via deductive reasoning. The exercise is highly interactive, with the instructor providing hints and helpful questions. The questions concern ways in which fossil preservation reveals information about things like what kind of organism the fossil represents, how that organism lived, and how the fossil came into being.

This is an activity for introductory students to learn about how archaeologists observe and describe objects unknown to them.

This book is intended for use in a variety of introductory archaeology settings, such as in lectures and lab courses. This text can complement an existing traditional text or completely replace a standard text. It can be used for its activities or as a study resource. When we wrote this text, we designed the chapters to be brief, providing concise and to-the-point information. This book is not intended to replace lectures or direct instruction from an instructor; rather, it supports learning in a variety of settings and formats. The book can be printed in whole, read digitally, or used piecemeal in either format. However you use this text, we hope that you find it serves as an instructive learning tool and that you dig archaeology as much as we do!

In preparation for this assignment, students have read a brief section in their textbook on the fossilization process as it relates to dinosaurs. In addition they will have had one lecture on taphonomy that briefly covers the processes that transpire from the death of a dinosaur until its discovery by a paleontologist. Students work in groups. Each group is given a quarry map of a dinosaur locality and no other information. The exercise is framed as detecive work, where the "scene of the crime" is represented by the quarry map. The objective is to gather clues to make an informed intepretation. Students can obtain additional clues, but to do so, they must formulate a hypothesis that can be tested by the information they seek. However, they only get to formulate 10 hypotheses. An untestable hypothesis wastes a potential clue. Once students have gathered all their clues, they are encouraged to discuss the significance. Students write up their own interpretation and its limitations individually. The exercise gives students practice with taphonomic data and both its potential and limitations; hypothesis formulation; and examining differing viewpoints as group discussions often lead to debates about what information would be most important.

This video, from ClimateCentral, features a team of scientists from the Northern Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling Project who study atmospheric air bubbles trapped in an ice core. This work highlights a period in Greenland's ice sheet which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 10,000 years; a period known as the Eemian. The air bubbles from the ancient atmosphere reveal what happened with climate change over that period of time.

In this activity, students are guided through graphs of surface air temperature anomaly data and Vostok ice core data to illustrate how scientists use these data to develop the basis for modeling how climate is likely to change in the future.

This exercise introduces students to the concept of temporal and spatial fidelity, to the different types of fossil assemblages, and how the taphonomic characteristics of an assemblage can be used to assess the relative state of fidelity. The exercise is suitable when introducing the discipline of taphonomy, typically covered near the beginning of a course in paleontology or paleobiology.

Because most universities lack appropriate collections of fossils, particularly collections from assemblages with unusual states of preservation, this exercise provides digital images of fossils from a Middle Devonian obrution deposit (or smothered assemblage) found within thin bedded limestones of the Hamilton Group of western New York State.

Students are asked to make predictions concerning the relative states of preservation likely to be found in life assemblages (biocoenoses) and death assemblages (thanatocoenoses and taphocoenoses). A biocoenosis is an assemblage that contains virtually all of the species that existed when the community was alive. A thanatocoenosis is a death assemblage where all the fossils represented existed within the community, but not all community members are present as fossils (species are missing). Finally, a taphocoenosis is an assemblage where not all species present in the community are represented as fossils, and not all the fossil species within the assemblage lived in the community (i.e., there is temporal or spatial mixing). Students are then presented with a PowerPoint presentation of the Hamilton Group strata, the limestones possessing the unusual fossil assemblage, and finally images of fossils with their preservational characteristics highlighted. The slides are annotated to provide observational descriptions and not interpretations. The exercise works best with students working in small groups with each group supplied with a laptop containing the PowerPoint presentation. Finally, each group is asked to interpret the assemblage type represented (bio-, thanato-, or taphocoenosis) and present a cogent argument citing supportive preservational evidence. (Because the assemblage is created through obrution, the assemblage is correctly interpreted as a thanatocoenosis â the fossils present were found within the community with many individuals preserved in life position and with behaviors represented; not all species in the community, however, are preserved as fossils.)

If time allows, students could be asked to make predictions concerning the preservational characteristics expected for each assemblage type in advance of the exercise. (A table is attached that I use to help frame their predictions.) Their interpretation and evidential argument could be written up as a short essay. I've asked students to do this individually and other times as a collaborative writing assignment for the group.

Once the correct assemblage interpretation is revealed to the students, they could be asked to speculate about the mechanism leading to this style of preservation (i.e., recognizing it as an obrution deposit). A few figures are provided that are helpful in explaining obrution.

The following files are uploaded as supportive teaching materials:
1. Discussion Assemblage Types.doc: Notes to guide a discussion to acquire predictions for taphonomic characteristics for each assemblage type.
2. Fossil Assemblages Exercise.ppt: PowerPoint presentation that describes the unknown fossil assemblage.
3. Exercise Assemblage Fidelity Assignment.doc: The handout provided students describing the exercise.
4. Obrution Deposits.ppt: PowerPoint presentation explaining obrution deposits.

In this activity, students will use oxygen isotope values of two species of modern coral to reconstruct ambient water temperature over a four-year period. They use Microsoft Excel, or similar application, to create a spreadsheet of temperature values calculated from the isotope values of the corals by means of an algebraic equation. Students then use correlation and regression techniques to determine whether isotope records can be considered to be good proxies for records of past temperatures.