ARCHAEOLOGY PROF STUDIES NEW TECHNOLOGY, NEW IDEAS

Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Jim Wright returns this semester from a leave funded by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for Teacher-Scholars. The release time is intended to give grantees the opportunity to pursue new areas of research and teaching. Wright has used the leave to investigate a technology and an interdisciplinary approach that offer new insights into his field and hopes to develop a new course on the basis of what he has learned.

During his leave, Wright says, "I have been reading about landscapes and human activities in them, which includes cultural geography and historical ecology. I am interested in the construction of landscapes by humans and their cultures; how space is experienced by humans and, through that sensory and cognitive process, is turned into places; how the speaking, writing and representation of spaces transforms them into places of inhabitation that permanently alter the ‘natural' landscape and have an echoing impact on later generations and later occupations — even by different peoples with different cultures."

Wright also spent a portion of his leave learning Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a technology that enables users to overlay different maps and plot spatially referenced data in three dimensions. With GIS, data can be represented as "floating numbers" that do not have to be configured in lines. "Each one of these points can be linked to a database of information," Wright notes.

He explains that while GIS is an important innovation, "it is not an elixir that will solve the problems that researchers have been working at for a long time. GIS is only as good as the questions that one brings to it."

While on leave, Wright began to develop an undergraduate course on the cultural geography of landscapes that will pose some of these questions and use GIS as a tool to explore the answers. "Such a course will introduce basic concepts of geography, human ecology and historical ecology; consider the relationship between humans and nature; look at the spatial configuration of culture through the experiences of individual humans and groups or communities of humans; and then look at how humans and landscapes interact in a dynamic way," he says.

Wright will develop data-representation problems for students to tackle, involving overlapping layers that plot a region's rainfall, geological strata and elevation. Students might use GIS to examine the distribution of seeds in an area in relationship to the number of grinding stones (used to process the seeds) that have been excavated there. GIS, Wright says, "is one of the coming tools of archaeology. Students need to be aware of it, and we need to begin to make it available to them."

Wright is collaborating on curriculum development with Bryn Mawr colleagues Peter Magee, assistant professor of classical and Near Eastern archaeology; Maria Luisa Crawford, professor and chair of geology; Donald Barber, assistant professor of geology; and Richard Davis, professor and chair of anthropology. "We are all involved in spatial analysis and representation," he explains.

<<Back to Bryn Mawr Now 1/16/2004