For my engaged archaeology project, I worked with Josh. We made a cooking show/documentary about Archaeology. It consisted of a total of three episodes about 15 minutes each with a cooking segment and an educational segment. Each of the three videos started off with a set of interview questions we did to our friends and peers about Archaeology. The questions we asked them were:
1) What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Archaeology?
2) What do you think an Archaeologist does?
3) If you had to figure out what food ancient people ate, how would you do it?
4) What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of technology?
5) Do you think governments should fund campaigns to maintain and restore old monuments?
6) Do you believe in aliens?
7) What have you heard of Atlantis? Do you think such a thing could happen?
Surprisingly, many of the responses we got for these questions were way more in-depth and detailed than both Josh and I expected. Our interviewees came up with fairly accurate methods for determining past people’s diets and had a fairly accurate view of what archaeologists do.
Our first episode was focused on explaining how archaeologists develop theories about ancient peoples’ diets and what archaeology is, etc. We prepared a Mayan dish: Hot Chocolate and salsa. In the second episode, we focused on technology and archaeology. We talked about many of the methods we discussed in class and also had a special guest for our show: Ethan! We interviewed him about the use of technology in archaeology and he was able to be a part of our show!
Our third and final episode of this mini-series focused on pseudoarchaeology. We interviewed Professor Pollard in the Arcaheology department here at MSU and she had many interesting things to say about this topic. We also prepared an “Atlantian” salad recipe we found online, quite tasty!
Here is the link to our first episode if anyone would like to see it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy_fMZCs3vg&feature=youtu.be