Blake Learmonth's CU

First Americans, Grave Robbers, Headhunters, and the Internet:
Using WebQuests to search for the first Americans

This unit is intended to be taught as a series of interdisciplinary lessons at the middle school level (grades six seven and eight) at Jefferson Middle School in Albuquerque New Mexico. Specifically, it is intended as a collaboration between the Technology Coordinator and social studies and science teachers.

Jefferson Middle School is part of the Albuquerque Public Schools system, a large school district encompassing urban, suburban, and rural areas. Built in 1939 on what were then the outskirts of Albuquerque, it is now located in an established neighborhood very near the University of New Mexico and the center of town.

Jefferson’s students are a diverse group both ethnically and in terms of socioeconomic status. About fifty percent of students identify themselves as Anglo, forty percent as Hispanic, and ten percent as other, including African American, and Asian American. Jefferson’s district includes well established upper middle class neighborhoods associated with the university, the “student ghetto” and older downtown neighborhoods which include everything from Victorian mansions to government subsidized housing and homeless shelters. About thirty five percent of our students participate in the federally funded free lunch program. Approximately forty percent or our students are listed as LEP (Limited English Proficiency) although that number seems high based on what I have seen in various classrooms.

Standardized tests consistently rank Jefferson students well above local and national averages. There are a number of possible explanations for this including: competent, supportive administration, unusually stable and dedicated staff, and involved parents often coming from the University area where valuing education and academic success are simply part of the culture. Consistent success as measured by standardized tests has lessened the pressures for “reform” at Jefferson, leaving a fairly traditional school structure that looks very similar to junior high schools I attended decades ago. Interdisciplinary collaboration and grade-level teaming are just starting to take hold.

In terms of technology, the school is in transition. All classrooms have at least one computer and are wired to the school network, the district network, and the Internet. Technology and Keyboarding are taught as elective subjects. Until recently, student access to computers was limited to those classes and to using a small lab set up in the library. With severely limited funding we have launched into the next phase, which is to put computers in the hands of students in their regular classes. This is being accomplished with mobile laptop carts, which roll into the classroom, connect to the school network and a printer and then connect wirelessly to as many as thirty student laptops. New toward the end of the 2001/2002 school year, these were used for Internet research, desktop publishing and word processing, and using spreadsheets to organize and evaluate statistics. The mobile labs have been very well received by both students and teachers, but since they can only reach one class at a time their impact on teaching and learning will be limited until we can acquire more.

I would like to use this unit to encourage collaboration between science and social studies teachers and the technology coordinator while using technology resources to help students learn about theories of Native American origins, synthesize that information, and go on to create tools for teaching the information to younger students or their peers.

The unit should also make teachers and students familiar with WebQuests and related Internet teaching tools. The unit will address the following NETS technology standards, as well as New Mexico science and social studies standards.

4. Technology communications tools
Students use telecommunications to collaborate, publish, and interact with peers, experts, and other audiences.
Students use a variety of media and formats to communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences.

5. Technology research tools
Students use technology to locate, evaluate, and collect information from a variety of sources.
Students use technology tools to process data and report results.
Students evaluate and select new information resources and technological innovations based on the appropriateness for specific tasks.
Specific Middle School Standards:
Prior to completion of Grade 8, students will:
5. Apply productivity/multimedia tools and peripherals to support personal productivity, group collaboration, and learning throughout the curriculum.

6. Design, develop, publish, and present products (e.g., Web pages, videotapes) using technology resources that demonstrate and communicate curriculum concepts to audiences inside and outside the classroom

4. Students will understand the physical world through the concepts of change, equilibrium, and measurement.

E. Relate the contributions of external and internal forces to change in the form and function of objects, organisms, and natural systems.

2. Describe the general idea of evolution as: a series of more or less gradual changes that account for the present form and function of objects, organisms, and natural and artificial systems, and the present arising from materials and forms of the past.

E. Explain how fossils are formed and how fossils provide evidence of the complexity and diversity of life over time.

1. Infer the relative ages of fossils from their location in different strata and indictor fossils.

1 - History: Students are able to identify important people and events in order to analyze significant patterns, relationships, themes, ideas, beliefs, and turning points in New Mexico, United States, and world history in order to understand the complexity of the human experience.

A.2. Describe the characteristics of other indigenous peoples that had an affect upon New Mexico's development (e.g., pueblo farmers, great plains horse culture, nomadic bands, noting their development of tools, trading routes, adaptation to environments, social structure, domestication of plants, and animals).
B.4. Identify the interactions between American Indians and European settlers, including agriculture, cultural exchanges, alliances, and conflicts
C.1. Explain and describe the origins, obstacles, and impact of the Age of Exploration.

c. introduction of disease and the resulting population decline, especially among indigenous peoples.

One of my jobs as Technology Coordinator at Jefferson is to generate curriculum that will assist teachers in integrating technology into their class activities, because of that this unit will have two components, one that relates to the topic of Native American origins, and one that centers on the use of WebQuests as a teaching tool. (The strange spacing and capitalization of “WebQuest” is not a typo; it’s a “techie” thing…)

Speculating about and studying the origins of Native Americans by Europeans and Euro Americans has been going on since the first Europeans landed on these already well-populated shores about 500 years ago. Oral histories of Native Americans, including their creation stories, indicate that the subject was already well discussed, with a variety of ideas and beliefs well established, long before the Europeans even though of sailing this direction.

At least since Europeans joined the discussion, the search for the answer to the question “Where did the first Americans come from?” has lead to controversy. In the face of limited information, speculation has lead to conflict in many arenas as established religious, political, economic, cultural, and scientific beliefs were either challenged or supported by new bits of information. Many if not all the participants have, on occasion, behaved badly, in some cases really badly. It is a sordid history of dominant, individuals, groups, and nations trying to impose their beliefs and values on those who saw things differently; a struggle which continues to this day, and may simply be guaranteed when strong forces like religion and science clash.

Without a basic understanding of science’s version of the evolution of modern humans, evaluating information about Native American origins is very difficult. Many of the controversies that attend a discussion of Native American origins have also plagued the investigation of human origins in general. In the nineteenth century geologists proved to the satisfaction of many other scientists that the earth was much older than the October 23, 4004 BC date calculated by Biblical scholar, Dr. John Lightfoot from a very literal and detailed reading of Genesis (Thomas 124). Once the geologists opened the door, archaeologists and anthropologists were justified in wondering if humans were also more than 6000 years old. As the ability to date geologic layers improved and later technology allowed the dating of objects, it became possible to make better and better guesses as to the age of human remains and artifacts. In the mid to late 1800’s growing acceptance Darwin’s On the Origin of Species… sent scientists looking not only for ancient people but also for their predecessors (Darwin). Before long there was evidence that ancestors of humans had been around for a very long time. To make a very long story very short, twentieth century discoveries in Africa lead scientists to believe that our first upright, bipedal ancestors (Australopithecus) had evolved from “old world” primates sometime around 3.5 million years ago, almost certainly in Africa. Also in Africa, evidence of Homo erectus starts to show up about 1.5 million years ago, and archaic Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago.

Two groups of humans coexisted for a long period of time. Artifacts and remains of Homo sapiens sapiens (“modern” humans) and Homo sapiens neaderthalensis are both found which date from 300,000 years ago until Neanderthals disappear between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago. How the Neanderthals vanished is unclear. They may have been eliminated by groups of people, more like modern humans or the two groups may have interbred with Neanderthal traits slowly vanishing (Powell). Starting with 200,000 year-old Homo sapiens, artifacts and bones start to show up in places outside of Africa (first in Asia, then in Europe). At each step along the way the more modern versions of humans seem to have replaced their predecessors, leaving Homo sapiens as the only surviving hominid. Determining who was oldest, or where humans migrated first is very difficult; maybe the first place that African humans settled was Europe, not Asia, and remnants of those folks are yet to be found. In any case, humans were spread throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe by the time Neanderthals disappeared (Pough 857)(Gonick 63).

“If ‘ice age’ is used to refer to long, generally cool, intervals during which glaciers advance and retreat, we are still in one today… over 20 glacial advances and retreats have occurred in the last 2 million years. Our modern climate represents a short, warm period between glacial advances” (Illinois Museum). Over the last 60 million years or so “ice ages” gradually became the norm and warm periods, “interglacials” like the period we are in now, became the exception. Periods of glaciation occur in 100,000-year cycles with brief (10,000 to 30,000-year) periods of glacial retreat. Average temperatures change over long periods of time with shorter anomalous periods where it is warm during a cold period or cold in a period of general warming.

Although scientists do not always agree on the subject, glaciations seem to be caused by combinations of cyclical changes in the amount of solar energy that reaches the earth called Milankovitch Cycles. Milankovitch (which I have also seen spelled “Milancovic”) was a Serbian astronomer who first noticed the connection between the earth’s orbital position and climate. Here are the factors that have potential to affect climate along with the length of the cycle:

The climate is changed by the net effect of these cycles; for example it the earth’s orbit was at a period when it was as far from the sun as possible at the same time as tilt of the axis was at its maximum with winter occurring in the far away part of the orbit, winters would tend be very cold. Other more short term effects can be caused by major events on earth like asteroid strikes, large volcanic eruptions, or a species developing that becomes capable of producing large quantities of pollution and greenhouse gases (Illinois Museum).

Aside from the obvious changes in temperature, there are other changes that have dramatically impacted human development. Periods of glaciation also tend to be dryer with larger areas of desert and fewer large forests. With large amounts of the earth’s water tied up in glaciers, sea levels fell. In the most recent glaciation, which ended about 11,000 years ago, the coastline of the Americas extended out to the edge of the Continental Shelf, 100 km to 150 km out from current beaches, and created a wide, dry, inhabitable connection between Asia and North America. At the peak of the latest glaciation about 18,000 years ago, glaciers up to 2 km thick covered most of northern North America, Asia, and Europe, as far south as the middle of the United States. Small areas of what are now Chile and Argentina, and parts of New Zealand were also glaciated. Needless to say, the changeable and inhospitable climate in large parts of the world restricted human migration and according to Paleoclimatologist J.P. Steffensen, also restricted cultural development (Steffenson 2).

Although scientists agree that humans evolved in Africa (Pough 858)(Fagan 59), how and when humans arrived in the “New World” is hotly debated. The debate has been fueled by controversies relating to lack of hard data, poor technique and technology, and resistance to accepting discoveries from both established religious and established scientific communities. Generalizing about what Native Americans believe is risky. Native people, their cultures, their languages and religious beliefs are diverse. Like the Christian Garden of Eden origin beliefs (shared by Muslims, Jews and other religions with Middle Eastern origins), many Native American origin beliefs have humans being created shortly after the creation of the earth, leading to a “We have always been here,” outlook. This, unless one starts to play semantic games with the meaning of “always,” puts both Native and European religion at odds with scientific beliefs.

Where to start? Few scientists seriously entertain ideas of humans evolving in the new world for several reasons. First, there is no fossil record of anything from which humans could evolve; humans are not closely related to “New World Primates,” whose ancestors were separated from their African, Old World, counterparts millions of years ago when the continents separated (Fagan 61). The idea of parallel evolution, where the same species could evolve from different sources just doesn’t happen (Powell). Parallelism is common, where common traits develop in different species to fit similar environments. Sharks, ichthyosaurs, and dolphins, for example, evolved similar fusiform body shapes, despite being almost completely unrelated. So, no one is seriously looking for million year old humans in America these days.

By the time humans had evolved and started to move out of Africa, the American continents had been separated from the other continents for millions of years and long distances that made a water crossing close to impossible. Despite theories that suggest an ocean crossing may have been possible a few thousand years ago, proposed by Thor Heyerdal and others, I have not read of any evidence of boats being used by ancestors of modern humans, certainly not oceangoing boats,

hundreds of thousands of years ago.

On the other end of the time spectrum, we know that both North and South America were populated by established, well-developed societies of Native Americans when Europeans arrived in the 1500s. By their observations, and because of social and religious preconceptions, early European explorers believed that Native Americans had been here for at most a couple of thousand years; they speculated wildly as to where they might have come from, speculation included suggestions that Indians were descendants of Carthaginians, Phoenicians, survivors of Atlantis or a lost tribe of Israel. Wild speculation is no surprise from people so lost they believed they had landed on islands on the east coast of Asia (Fagan 25). Later contact with Aztecs suggested a society that was a bit older, but reports that suggested that American culture might be as old or older than European culture, Bernadino de Sahagun’s A General History of Things of New Spain (1569) for one, were quashed by European authorities. Believing that the long written history of the Maya were “superstitions and lies of the Devil,” Spanish Bishop Diego de Landa burned all the records he could find (Fagan 26). There was a concerted effort by Europeans to perpetuate the idea that Native Americans were a fairly new and primitive people, a philosophy necessary to justify subjugation of “savage” Natives by explorers and later settlers.

Slightly later, Thomas Jefferson took a serious interest in the ancient history of Native Americans and undertook scientific and well documented excavation of burial mounds on his Virginia estate. Jefferson’s scientific approach and continuing interest earned him the title of “father of American Ethnology.” Jefferson was a staunch defender of American Natives as the human equals of any person of European origin, a radical idea at the time. On the other hand, Jefferson’s detached scientific approach to Native Americans set a precedent for studying “Indians as scientific specimens…not terribly unlike mastodons and glaciers.” An attitude which has led “ many modern Indians to see him as America’s first scientific grave robber” (Thomas 35). This dichotomy still plagues American anthropologists today; in many ways, they have been the strongest and most influential non-native supporters of Indian causes and yet have perpetrated unthinkable atrocities when they shifted into the Indians-as-specimens mode.

By the early 1800s, as Euro-Americans spread out across the continent, remnants of pre-colonial civilization were impossible to ignore and it became increasingly obvious that the stereotypical view of all early Americans as primitive nomadic savages was unsupportable. Huge burial mounds, with finely crafted artifacts and evidence of large permanent structures from the Midwest into Florida led people to conclude that there had to have been earlier, non-Indian inhabitants of America. Many concluded that these sophisticated early Euro-Americans had been wiped out by swarms of savage Indians who descended upon them much as hordes of Mongol barbarians had descended on the Roman Empire. The racist “White Guys Here First” idea still has a strong appeal as evidenced by newspaper headlines, which appeared when “Kennewick Man” (more about Kennewick Man later) was discovered in Washington State. If Europeans were here first, the twisted logic goes, then Euro-Americans could be justified or at least absolved in the matter of taking the continent away from Indians. The foreshortened view of history common in the 1800s led to the belief that Indians had taken the continent from civilized “white” people fairly recently, so taking it back was only fair.

Whatever damage archaeologists may have caused, their research, funded by museums and institutions like the Smithsonian, in the mid to late 1800s, put an end to the belief that Mound Builders were Europeans. After four years of extensive excavation of mounds from the Dakotas to Florida, Cyrus Thomas, working for the Smithsonian, concluded that all the mounds and ancient structures “could be attributed to the ancestors of the Modern Native Americans” (Thomas 134). There were also a few finds where of bones or extinct animals were found with what seemed to be ancient stone tools of human manufacture. Tools and extinct animal bones found together in Europe in rocks that geologists said were very old had scientists crashing firmly into the Biblically established limits on human existence. Once European had crashed the Bible barrier, Americans started asking, “What about an American Stone Age?”

Once Americans learned from European archaeologists what Stone Age, Paleolithic, tools looked like, they started finding them everywhere. The catch was, and still is, that taken out of context, an 11,000 year old artifact is pretty much indistinguishable from one made yesterday by a modern flintknapper. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Stone Age technology was still dominant among Native Americans well into the 1800s, so tools and remnants of tool making only a few decades old could easily be found mixed with very ancient ones. On the other hand, authentic tool making techniques, probably passed on from person to person for many generations, could have been observed first hand. A second catch is that credible “stone tools” can be made by nature; and in an archaeological frenzy, any rock with a sharp edge becomes a tool. In Europe and America, finds of authentic Paleolithic tools were swamped by collections of “sharp rocks.” Out of frustration with unsupportable stone tools “famous French paleontologist Marcelin Boule threw flint cobbles into a cement mixer. He soon had a collection of superb prehistoric artifacts” (Fagan 169)

Barraged by claims of very old sites, archaeologists and other scientists of the early 1900s, particularly William Holmes and Aleš Hrdlicka, set standards by which artifacts could be dated. The standards were:

� Clearly defined stratigraphy (layers of rocks and sediments), and a clear understanding of the stratigraphic context of the find and of the layers in which they are found.

� If possible, field and laboratory evidence from other disciplines to support the chronological and geological context, bones of extinct animals, for example.

� The presence of the humanly made artifacts in a primary stratigraphic context (not in sediments that have been churned by natural forces or animals), that are established as being of human manufacture according to strict scientific criteria.

� Added in the 1950s: Reliable and consistent radiocarbon dates or dates established by some other widely accepted chronological method (Fagan 143,

Dixon 4) (Parenthesis added by author).

Although important in creating legitimacy in archeological finds and in fact creating legitimacy for archeology as a science, adherence to these strict guide lines produced variations on the following scenario which is described over a hundred times in James Dixon’s poorly named Bones Boats & Bison:

A scientist, or sometimes an amateur archeologist finds what seem to be artifacts. The site is painstakingly excavated, often for years, with evidence examined and recorded carefully. For recently discovered sites, radiocarbon dates are established for items closely associated with the artifacts. If those radiocarbon dates indicate that the site is very old, outside experts (the Archaeology Police) are called. If the site is sufficiently interesting, they show up, check the site and data out briefly, announce that there are numerous problems with the site or the artifacts, bandy about the word “dubious,” declare that the site is much younger than the diggers believe (always within the established no-site-older-than-X thousand years old-rule), and leave. Nasty notes, and these days, emails fly back and forth, scientific papers are written and refuted and the site is then often destroyed by acts of nature or government (Dixon all) (Fagan 143).

The no-site-older-than date has changed, but the scenario has not. In the early 1900s Holmes and Hrdlicka set the date at 4000 years BP (Before Present) and declared all sites they visited as younger than that; they were educated, competent people and were often right about the sites they investigated; however, they had the effect of stifling research. Frank H.H. Roberts a colleague of Hrdlicka’s at the Smithsonian admitted that “questions of early man in America became virtually taboo, and no anthropologist, or for that matter geologist or paleontologist, desirous of a successful career would tempt the fate of ostracism by intimating that he had discovered indications of a respectable antiquity for the Indian” (Willey 55). Although it is reported that Hrdlicka went to his death in 1943 believing in the 4000 year old barrier (Fagan 50), most of his colleagues were convinced that a site claiming earlier occupation was legitimate. That site was the Folsom site, named after a nearby New Mexico town. It was discovered in 1908 by George McJunkin, Cowboy, and “self-taught natural scientist.” Over the years he excavated bones from an arroyo wall that had been eroded by flood waters. When he concluded that the huge bones were not from any existing animal he started writing to specialists, none of whom wrote back. McJunkin told several people about his discovery and, after his death, McJunkin’s directions to the site passed from person to person until excavation was later begun by amateur naturalists, who excavated a “sack of bones,” compared them with pictures and descriptions in paleontology books and decided that they had the bones of “a very big bison”(Thomas 147). Years later they ended up on the desk of Jesse Figgins, Director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History along with a stone spear point. The bones were those of a long-extinct form of bison that had vanished at the end of the last ice age; out of context, the point was a mystery. For several years Figgins and others dug the Folsom site finding many more bones and points, but were reluctant to publish their findings until they found a point still embedded between two bison ribs (Several previous finds had put bones and points in close association, but they had been warned not to report their findings until it was possible for experts to see the bones and artifacts in place). Leaving the point and ribs in place, the “Archeology Police” were called. In the face of overwhelming evidence, still in place and observed by many, the No-Site-Older-Than date just jumped back 7000 years. The bones and distinctive “Folsom” points were dated at 11,000 years old. Even without Hrdlicka’s agreement the evidence was just too convincing. Other Folsom sites soon turned up including one at Blackwater Draw near Clovis New Mexico. Folsom points, (see illustration) are finely crafted, not at all primitive by stone tool standards. Archeologists John Cotter and E. B. Howard, who were digging the Clovis site, reasonably concluded that there must have been a more primitive technology before Folsom; so they dug deeper and found larger points, debatably more primitive, possibly used to hunt mammoths which were extinct earlier than the large bison. Several widely separated Clovis-like sites have since been excavated some containing very large, but still Clovis-style stone points along with Mammoth bones. Reliable Clovis sites are dated to 12,500 years ago.

To my eye, Clovis points, particularly some very large unused ones that seem to have had a ceremonial purpose, are still fairly evolved stone work. It seems reasonable to assume that there was a more primitive stone tool technology before Clovis. Archeologists are now actively searching for pre-Clovis sites while, in the tradition of Holmes-Hrdlicka, the “Clovis Mafia” attack the findings of all sites older than 12,000 years (Thomas 156). If we temporarily ignore sites claimed to be as much as 30,000 years old, the questions to be answered are, “where did ancestors of Clovis people come from and how did they get here?”

The most accepted current theory about where the first Americans came from was first suggested, surprisingly, in the late 1500s by Jesuit Jos� de Acosta, who speculated that “small groups of savage hunters” had traveled overland from Asia with “only short stretches of navigation,” settled in the Americas where they multiplied and prospered (Fagan 28). Remarkably, de Acosta came up with the theory with no knowledge of far northern Asian or far North American geography, an area which was blank on maps of his time. The Bering Strait was not discovered by modern Europeans until 1728. One has to wonder if de Acosta’s ideas might have come from the oral or written histories of the Mexican or Peruvian Indians with whom he lived. Add to de Acosta’s theory

a few details of natural history and it could come from any modern textbook.

Twelve thousand years ago, when at least very early, if not the first, Americans were arriving on the continent a long period of glaciation, an ice age, was ending, but huge quantities of water were still tied up in glaciers, which covered large parts of North America significantly lowering sea level. Sea level was as much as 100 meters lower than it is now, which significantly altered North American and Asian geography. For as long as I can remember, I have heard that people came across a “land bridge” from Asia. In my mind a “bridge” is a narrow thing; I would not consider the Middle East as a “land bridge” between Africa and Asia, though is clearly a place where people could cross between the two continents. Similarly, the Bering Land Bridge was actually a subcontinent, called Beringia, by modern writers, a wide, dry, land mass, which existed many times in the last few million years, and in this case for centuries, if not longer. It was not a very hospitable place, but there were permanent plants, though few trees, animals of all sizes and people. Rather than the mad dash across a bridge (picture Hollywood Israelites in fur parkas fleeing while a hooded Moses holds back the sea…), people slowly migrated across and probably lived permanently, at least seasonally, in all parts of Beringia. During the dry periods in Beringia animals could and did move both directions, prehistoric horses, it seems, evolved in America, crossed into Asia and then became extinct in the Americas. When the waters slowly returned, people and other animals took up residence on both sides of the water and, the theory goes, moved southward. The historical connection between people on both sides of what is now the Bering Strait is almost universally accepted. Similar stone tools and other artifacts are found on both sides, there are linguistic connections, common oral histories, and the people look alike and have similar life styles.

Once on the permanently dry land east of Beringia, glaciers would have been a very serious obstacle to southward migration even for people who must have been well adapted for very cold climates. Unless large quantities of food could have been brought along, starvation would have precluded a band of people from making the months-long trek across what would have appeared to be an endless sheet of ice. There would have been nothing to hunt or gather and one would have to wonder what would have motivated people to set out on such a journey. But, somehow, people showed up in Clovis, NM, while glaciers still covered large parts of North America.

Many, but not all, scientists believe that there may have been a significant gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets, an “ice free corridor” through which people could have passed, living off of scarce resources, and surviving what National Geographic’s Thomas Cranby described as “ a formidable place…an Ice-walled valley of frigid winds and fierce snows” (Cranby 330). The gap did exist; and animals such as mammoth, western camel, and saber-toothed cats (and some edible plants) left fossils there (Fagan 139), but whether the entire corridor was ever open at the same time is still unclear, though Native legends talk of migrations blocked by “ice…that… reached all the way to the sky.” According to Paiute oral history:

Ice had formed ahead of them, and it reached all the way to the sky. The People could not cross it… A Raven flew up and struck the ice and cracked it. Coyote said, “These small people can’t get across the ice.” Another Raven flew up and again cracked the ice. Coyote said, “Try again, try again.” Raven flew up again and broke the ice. The people ran across (Parfit

43).

Though the idea of 100,000 year old ocean going boats is only slightly more believable than the brought-here-by-space-aliens theory, a later migration involving small skin boats moving in short jumps down the West Coast is more plausible. Proposed in the conclusion of James Dixon’s Bones, Boats, and Bison (Dixon 243-256), and mentioned by Fagan (Fagan 141) the boats-down-the-coast theory, which was met “with derision…when it was first proposed 30 years ago” by Knunt Fladmark a Simon Fraser University archeology professor, is gaining credibility (Henderson). Evidence from the “On Your Knees Cave” on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, including a 10,000 year old human skeleton (Parfit 40), doesn’t break the Clovis Barier, but contributes to the boats-down-the-coast theory in the following ways: analyzed with the cooperation of local Native Americans, the human remains from the cave indicate that the person had a diet of almost exclusively marine foods. Additionally, 10,000 years ago Prince of Wales Island was an island, the only way to get there would have been by boat, so Dixon reasonably concludes, “humans living along the coast of Southeast Alaska were using watercraft, were primarily dependant on marine foods…and were capable of intercoastal navigation” (Dixon 119). The-boats-down-the-coast theory is very attractive, especially as sites are uncovered that seem to date to a time when glaciers blocked overland routes. Since areas of the coast were not glaciated (underwater excavations have brought up parts of trees and other vegetation over 12,200 years old, along with at least one stone tool) (Monastersky 85), groups of people could have paddled skin boats similar to historical Eskimo kayaks from sheltered cove to sheltered cove, living off abundant marine life. Dixon also makes connections between the hunting technology of Artic marine hunters and those of Clovis people (Dixon 250-253), though in the absence of really complete artifact sets, the comparison involves a lot of speculation. If there is a “Boat Barrier” in terms of how early is it possible that people developed boats capable of navigating short stretches of Artic waters, it is unclear how early that barrier might be, since the farther back in time one goes the less likely it is to find good evidence of a biodegradable skin boat.

If boats in the Pacific, why not boats in the Atlantic? Europeans also made skin boats, though there is no evidence of large ocean-going ones. As mentioned above, ancient boats are very biodegradable, so not having found a preserved one yet is no obstacle to speculation. Bruce Bradley, archaeologist and stone tool expert, and Dennis Stanford, a Smithsonian Institution archaeologist, suggest that there are more similarities between the thin flake stone tool technology of the French and Spanish Soultrean people and Clovis people than between Clovis any of the Asian tool groups (Thomas 172) (Chatters 258). Although This connection has been discounted by Soultrean experts, mostly because Soultrean points disappear about 19,000 years ago and the oldest confirmed Clovis sites are about 12,000 years old, recent discoveries in the Southeastern US are supporting the “French Connection” in three ways: first, the oldest Paleoamerican sites are now on the East Coast and they are noticeably older than Clovis. Some, like the Meadocroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania date back to the most recent Soultrean finds. Second, if ancient people skirted and even camped on the Atlantic ice sheets it would make sense for them to have settled first on the Atlantic coast. Third, according to Bradley who along with his formal Cambridge education is an accomplished flintknapper, a maker of stone tools, the Soultrean is slightly less sophisticated than the Clovis technology, making it a logical technological progression from Soultrean to Clovis. The stone flaking techniques used by Soultreans and Clovis people are nearly identical, but the Clovis points have an extra flake, called a flute, off the base of the point that facilitates binding the point to the shaft (Bradley Website) (see earlier illustration).

Although controversial, there are several sites in North and South America that are gaining support or are accepted as older than Clovis. With the “Clovis Barrier” down or at least weakened “some scientists now place humans in the Americas 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 or more years ago”( Parfit 44). Some of the sites have Clovis-style artifacts; others have stone, bone and wood tools that predate Clovis technology both in sophistication and age.

Reading about ancient sites, particularly in literature intended for archeologists and anthropologists, can be really confusing. At first I thought that the ages of sites were simply being misreported, or at least being reported as different numbers by different authors. The apparent discrepancy comes from the fact that radiocarbon dating is used to date almost all archaeological sites in America, and radiocarbon years are not the same as calendar years. 5,000 radiocarbon years = 5,700 Gregorian calendar years, 10,000 radiocarbon years ago is 11,400 calendar years ago, 20,000 radiocarbon years ago is 23,700 calendar years ago… But, the scale is not linear so extrapolating dates is very difficult. Radio carbon dates are often indicated by a following BP (Before Present) 5800 � 60 _B.P., for example. Unfortunately, a few authors also use BP to just mean “before present” in regular calendar years. Figuring out the dates is a little like trying to figure out distances in a Tolkein novel where Tolkein switches back and forth between modern and archaic English measuring systems. Apparent discrepancies of 1,000 to 2000 or more years probably result from this, not scientists just getting the numbers wrong. Unless I have misinterpreted the information, all dates in this paper are in regular calendar years ago. The December 2000 issue of National Geographic has a simple chart for estimating radiocarbon dates in regular calendar years (Parfit 45) (The following is a chart of American Archaeological sites, not the National Geographic chart just mentioned).

Age of Site	Name of Site	Location (citation)
12,500 years	Clovis	New Mexico USA
13,500	Luzia	Brazil (Parfit 45)
13,800	Broken Mammoth	Alaska USA (Parfit 48)
14,000	Acuilla River	Florida USA
14,000	Kenosha Mammoth sites, Schaefer,Herbior, Mud Lake, Fenske and Chesrow/Lucas.	Wisconsin USA (Kepecs 50)
15,000	Taima-Taima	Venesuela (Dixon 99)
18,000	Cactus Hill.	Virginia USA (Parfit 44)
20,000	Meadocroft Rock Shelter	Pennsylvania USA (Parfit 49)
30,000	Monte Verde	Chile (Chatters 248)

Note that the oldest sites are farthest from Beringia; this has helped to fuel the theories of people coming to America in some way different from the conventionally accepted and taught walk across the land bridge. The very early sites open up the discussion of the ancient Americans to virtually all levels of speculation. The evidence from the Kenosha mammoth sites has people living right up against the glaciers long before they had receded enough for people to cross over or through them. Maybe the first people came in the brief warm period before the latest ice surge.

Most of the sites studied have only evidence of humans, not actual human remains. When human remains become involved, particularly in the U.S., controversies of a different kind erupt.

In July of 1996 a scull and some bones that had washed out of a Columbia River bank were brought to James Chatters, a forensic anthropologist by the Coroner of Benton County Washington. The scene as described in Chatters’ recent book, Ancient Encounters, has a small town, good ol’ boy feel to it. In Chatters’ working for the Coroner mode, with no real context for the bones, a quick examination of the narrow ordinary looking skull produced the casual comment that it looked like a Caucasian. But then it seemed “old”; maybe a pioneer. Chatters later came to regret being so casual with the “C” word as it was called by Thomas in Skull Wars. In his defense, forensic anthropologists often use racial terms as shorthand to describe groups of physical features in modern crime victims even though they know as anthropologists that race is a cultural construct without scientific meaning.

The more Chatters looked at the skull the older it looked; the full set of very worn teeth worried him; that is a common feature of ancient Native American skulls, which for the last several thousand years look very much like modern Indian skulls. This skull was the “wrong” shape. Chatters and others went to the site where the skull had been found and, in the course of several trips, recovered most of the skeleton. When a stone point was found imbedded in the skeleton’s hip the complexion of the situation changed, though with the age of the remains unknown, and without their being let in on the existence of the point, casual, though trained, observers still looked over the bones and made comments like, “white guy” (Chatters 38). The “white guy” theme carried over into the local paper which ran the story under the headline “SKULL LIKELY EARLY WHITE SETTLER.” The headline and others like it caught the attention of members of the local Umatilla tribe, who “wanted a second opinion” (Chatters 35). Chatters arranged to have radiocarbon dating done on a tiny piece of the skeleton, by then being called Kennewick Man. The results came back as an astounding 9500 years old. Instantly everyone wanted to claim him. Several, but not all, Native American tribes in the area demanded he be returned to them as they believed was required by NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires that Native remains be returned to the appropriate tribe for reburial or whatever disposition that the tribe deems proper. Since its creation in 1993 NAGPRA has had museums and archaeologists scrambling to catalog their collections of Native bones and artifacts so tribes could request their return. Many tribes have in fact requested their ancestors be returned and thousands have been reburied (Thomas 214). NAGPRA also requires that archaeologists and anthropologists who discover Native remains work closely with tribes most likely to be connected with the remains. In addition to Native Americans, a white supremacist group, and a Samoan from California all claimed “K man” as their long lost relative and demanded that scientists stop studying him so he could be reburied immediately. Scientists put their claim in when the Army Corps of Engineers clumsily asserted their jurisdiction over K man, took physical possession of the body, and suggested that they would turn him over to local Native Americans for reburial basically without any of the NAGPRA requirements being met. The Corps also totally destroyed the site where K man was found, burying it under tons of rubble to protect it from damage (for all we know there could be a family of people buried there).

Participants in the squabble all retained lawyers and the fight goes on to this day. Native Americans and scientists took positions that were polar opposites. The tribes contended that any body that dated to before Europeans landed in America was automatically their ancestor since they had always been here. Scientists took the opposite view that a 9500 year old skeleton could not reasonably be associated with any modern group and therefore belonged to everyone and should be studied to reveal what it could about all people’s history. The controversy has gotten very vocal, very public, and very personal, with articles in most major newspapers, discussion on talk shows and news shows with race playing a major part in many of the discussions. Jim Chatters has been seriously chastised by strangers and colleagues alike for his casual use of racial descriptions of K man. By his own account, he has been called a racist and a grave robber (preceded by an expletive). In the process, K man’s remains have been shuffled around by various authorities sometimes protected from everyone with tight security, sometimes authorities allowed access so unsupervised that pieces have turned up missing and non K man bones and other items have been added to the collection. Except for the loss of scientific access to a remarkably significant find, it is a little difficult to understand what all the fuss is about.

Contrary to the western movie version of history, scalping was a tradition brought to America by the French and Native Americans were as often the victims as the perpetrators and the “Headhunters” in the title of this paper and this section were exclusively Euroamericans most often sponsored by the U.S. government.

Nineteenth century anthropology and to some extent nineteenth century science in general, was strongly colored by a Eurocentric world view. Europeans controlled the world economically, politically, and militarily. They perceived themselves as superior to other groups of people and justified in their world domination. Developing science of the time had a fascination with classification, putting things in groups, which is still a mainstay of science. Partially I believe, as a justification for the way they treated people that they conquered or inhabitants of lands they colonized, Europeans developed the concept of race. People, the theory went, could be put into groups based on their observable characteristics (their differences from Europeans) and all kinds of assumptions about their abilities, intelligence and propensity for certain kinds of behavior could be presumed by association. At its most extreme scientists actually considered non-European peoples to be different species, believing, in inconceivable ignorance, that successful interbreeding among different peoples was impossible. This myth was actually put forward by Linnaeus, the originator of the biological classification system in common usage today. Of course, Europeans always came out on top of any classification scheme (Thomas 37).

Caught between humanism and greed, Europeans used the “scientific” classification of some groups of people as lesser forms of human or not fully human as justification for slavery and oppression of all kinds. Scientists set out to find evidence to support racial mythology. Phrenology, studying skulls, became one of the most accepted ways of classifying people and evolved into a pseudo-science, the practitioners of which claimed to be able to tell virtually everything about a person by “reading” the bumps on their head. Scientists, who for the most part saw the bump readers as quacks, still were convinced by the more serious reading of skulls by well credentialed scientists. One commonly held belief was that there was a direct relationship between skull volume, brain size, and intelligence; we know today, for the differences that occur within humans that the relationship doesn’t exist; but at the time it made sense in a common sense sort of way, and was not questioned. Not surprisingly, through poor measuring technique, lack of representative samples, and possibly outright fraud, European skulls came out as having the largest volume and the appropriate, though incorrect, conclusions of European superiority were supported.

Americans were in no way immune from the fascination with studying skulls. Samuel Morton, an American with two medical degrees, became one of the worlds greatest proponents of racial determinism based on skull measurements. “In his classic Crania Americana, published in 1839, he developed his theory of human racial origins, signaling the beginning of physical Anthropology in America” (Thomas 40). So, from its beginnings, race and a belief in racial characteristics was ingrained in American anthropology. Always a problem for medical researchers, the fascination with “skull science” exacerbated the shortage of bodies to be studied. The skull shortage combined with a fascination with Native Americans, and the already established

concept of Indians-as-specimens led to gruesome consequences in “Indian Country.”

Fueled by increasing demand for specimens by huge new museums like the Smithsonian, “Skull collecting—long an avocation of the elite natural historian—became in the words of one critic ‘a cottage industry on the frontier’” (Thomas 56). Thousands of Native American skulls, both ancient and recently dead, sometimes along with their bodies, were collected by hordes of American headhunters as Native Americans died of European diseases or were slaughtered in legitimate or dubious military encounters with the U.S. Army. At the order of the Secretary of War, Edward Stanton and the U.S. Surgeon General, William Hammond, the Army was instructed to “collect” and ship to eastern museums the remains of any Indians they could lay their hands on (Thomas 57). The army and civilians complied with a vengeance and museum collections swelled with countless bodies often of recently dead people whose names and relatives’ names were known and recorded.

In my outrage at reading of the actions of these government-sponsored grave robbers, I concluded, “this would never have happened to Euro-Americans!” I was wrong. Although not pursued openly or with such a clear intent to dishonor and demoralize a whole people, grave robbing was not limited to Native graves. For medical study, European bodies were in high demand and grave robbing by medical students lead to the “Doctor Riots” in New York in 1788 (Thomas 39). This in no way justifies the treatment of Native Americans but may portray a time when scientists had little respect for the dead unless they had known them personally.

The idea of race became a major component of the study of anthropology; the belief that racial characteristics extended to behavior, intelligence, capacity for cultural development and that those characteristics were determinable from simple skull measurements was simply accepted as scientific fact by laypeople and scientists alike. That idea still shows in the terminology used by modern Anthropologists, who know better. For those of us who have some background in science it is reassuring that despite language peppered with racial terms, modern Anthropologists now universally recognize race as a social or cultural construct. But what took them so long?

It is ironic that Franz Boaz, museum curator, multidisciplinary scientist, procurer and probably digger of hundreds of Indian skulls and bodies, “father of American anthropology” (Thomas 58) and promoter of a living museum at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 would be one of the first people to see the flaws in the doctrine of racial determinism. In his own career as a body snatcher, Boas had noticed considerable variation in the size and skull structure of people even in the same cultural group. Boas launched into an extensive study of immigrant populations in New York City, reasoning that “if the theory of distinct racial types had any validity, then immigrant New Yorkers should retain their essential racial characteristics” (Thomas 103). To his surprise, there were significant changes in the skull measurements in only one generation; the expanding study eventually measured the skulls and body dimensions of 18,000 immigrants, and verified the earlier findings. If head form could change in one or a few generations it could not possibly be used to put people into meaningful groups. Boas later stated, “racial classifications are merely social constructs loosely based on certain biological traits. ‘Race’ depends mostly on the experience and prejudices of the observer” (Thomas 114). Boas published his well-documented data and his conclusions early in the 1900s, and was largely ignored. Anthropologists of the time believed deeply in race, which had been invented by their recent predecessors; they were not about to give it up! Discounting Boas’s research, popular and personable Harvard Professor Earnest Hooton indoctrinated generations of anthropology students with his theories of racial determinism. “From 1913 until the early 1950s, Hooton trained virtually every physical anthropologist in America” (Thomas 109) He was a consummate and unashamed racist and a complete believer in Nordic superiority; his well-published

views dominated American anthropology until his death in 1954.

It took four decades for the American Anthropology Association to officially deny that race had any scientific basis, ironically calling the belief in racial differences a “folk belief… that has led to countless errors” in research (AAA 1998). The confusing status of race with modern anthropologists has led to ironies in large quantities, including the fundamental irony observed by Yolanda Moses, President of City College of New York, that “anthropology and its subfields (physical, cultural, and linguistic anthropology) have been involved in both the creation and demise of the concept of race” (Thomas 102).

“Demise” may be a little premature; the language and even the hi-tech tools of modern anthropology are laced with racial references. Chatters book on Kennewick man is full of these references and, the irony continues, an eloquent and thoughtful denial of race. Particularly in the early, narrative parts of Ancient Encounters, Chatters’ comments are full of racial language, with “white,” “Caucasian,” and “Mongoloid” being used frequently. Chatters repeatedly mentions that K man’s remains are not at all like modern Native Americans’, but only once or twice suggests that they aren’t really much like anybody modern. In his discussion of analysis of K man’s skull done by Joseph Powell and Jerome Rose in their role as part of an expert panel convened to try to determine the proper disposition of K man’s remains, Chatters presents charts generated using a computer database program called FORDISC. The results are significant in both the irony and the information. Ironically, the modern program uses skull measurements to group people into officially geographical, but pretty obviously racial groups, such as “Europe,” “Africa”, “Polynesia,” and “Asia… .” The programs works on the same old race-based classifications that got anthropologists in trouble for the last two centuries. If we get past the possible meaninglessness of the skull data suggested by the changeability of skulls over very short periods of time demonstrated by Boas’s research, interesting things are depicted. All the modern people are clumped together in occasionally overlapping groups; K man and all of the really old American skulls are far from all the modern skulls and not especially close to each other. Chatters recognizes that K man was “atypical of any modern people” but seems unable to resist the temptation to mention again at the conclusion of the chapter that K man does not “resemble American Indians or north Asians” (from whom mainstream anthropologists believe Native Americans descended) (Chatters 173-184).

In his comments specifically about race, Chatters indicates that he clearly understands the history and implications of race for anthropologists and also the “race is a myth” philosophy accepted by modern anthropologists.

An experienced forensic anthropologist can assign an unknown (modern) skull to one of these groups…that in the common parlance are designated “whites,” “Africans,” and “Asians.” Native Americans fall into the last group … with 85 percent accuracy based solely on surface observation. This is valuable, because a forensic anthropologist’s purpose is nothing more nefarious than to determine who a dead person is so that the deceased can be returned to grieving kin and, in the case of murder, the killer can be brought to justice… Racial terminology developed in the nineteenth century for an entirely different purpose. Races were seen as distinct groupings of human beings who had different capacities for learning, civilization, emotional expression, sexual behavior, and so on. It is bad science to use such terms… because the idea of human races has created injustices in America and elsewhere, and we know that races don’t exist… Human populations traditionally called races differ from each other by only about 15 percent, and the range of variation among the individuals in each of these populations is greater than the average difference between them…Physical differences on which (race was) based are superficial and in the words of C. Loring Brace, merely “kinship writ large” (Chatters 172) (Emphasis added by author).

In studying the origins of the first Americans, anthropologists are saddled with the racially loaded terminology of the past as well as a totally understandable backlash from some Native Americans caused by anthropology’s culpability in atrocities committed against both living and dead Native Americans. Partially because they make for more exciting news, events like those surrounding the Kennewick man discovery, where predominantly Euro-American scientists and tribes take up extreme and opposite positions are catching national attention. There are however, instances that may foreshadow the direction that future anthropology will take; instances like the exploration of the “Down on your Knees Cave” on Prince of Wales Island were local native people and anthropologists have cooperated, working within NAGPRA guidelines, in excavating a site which contained ancient human remains. Their discoveries have contributed important evidence supporting the Pacific side of the boats-down-the-coast theory. Cooperation will likely produce better results in studying America’s ancient past, even if, or maybe because, it will produce less sensational headlines.

Anthropology is an extremely speculative science. Huge creative leaps have to be made in piecing together a picture of an ancient people based on the thinnest shreds of actual evidence. Almost all we know about Clovis era people comes from their stone tools and the bones of the animals they hunted. Stone tools and bones may not begin to reveal the secrets of an ancient society but they are often all that is left. It is also an exciting time in anthropology. Controversy, whatever its negative effects, stimulates interest and the production of material to study. After being restrained for half a century by the “Clovis First Mafia,” anthropologists have been freed to pursue interesting possibly scenarios for the peopling of America. Did the first Americans arrive in one place or several? Did they come from one place or several? Did those who first arrived survive and prosper to become modern Native Americans or did they become extinct along with the mammoths and mastodons only to be replaced by the ancestors of modern Native Americans? Answers to these questions and doubtless others, are being postulated in books, magazines, and with increasing frequency, on the Internet, giving students a wide variety of exciting sources of information from which to form their own theories. The Internet has produced a wealth of information and a wealth of misinformation as well. Searching for information on Kennewick man, for example, will take you to the websites of Native American tribes, legitimate archaeologists and anthropologists, as well as to the websites of white supremacists determined to portray K Man as a 10,000 year old white guy, who was here before the Indians.

For some age groups, the unfiltered barrage of information may contribute to their critical thinking skills and lead to exciting projects involving media literacy in the Internet age. For younger students, or for expediency, structured Internet projects like WebQuests may be the best way to filter students’ exposure, distilling out relevant information and providing appropriate guidance and motivation in their quest for information.

My original opening sentence for this section, “At its most basic, a WebQuest is just a webpage, an HTML document posted on the Internet or a schools intranet, set up with links to send students to specific websites to find information” indicated that I shared a misconception about what a WebQuest is with many other educators who have written about how they use the Internet as a learning tool. What I had described is called a HotList by those who develop true WebQuests. Although a HotList is a tool to guide students electronic research to websites that are safe, reliable, and relevant to the topic that they are researching, it is not a WebQuest. True WebQuests tend to have a very specific format involving groups of students with specific roles to play, which guide their research. They are one of several types of structured Internet lessons designed to help teachers guide student’s web experience. HotLists, Scavenger Hunts (sometimes also called “Treasure Hunts), Multimedia Scrapbooks, and Subject Samplers are variations on a theme that fall short of being real WebQuests.

HotLists are webpages with a list of Internet resources. “A Topic Hotlist is an easy strategy to employ; you simply add the Web resources to an activity or unit you already have prepared.” When you create a Topic HotList, your learners will be spared hours of fruitless searching. What they will have is analogous to when your diligent school librarian gathers key works from the stacks on a topic your classes are studying and rolls them into your room for students to explore (March).

These are web pages like the HotList above with the addition of questions that students will answer from each site that they visit. By asking questions that can only be found by getting beyond the first few lines of the site’s Home Page students are encouraged to delve into the site and practice site navigation skills. If one is teaching web-searching skills, a scavenger hunt can be a series of questions and an exact word or phrase that students are instructed to search with a specific search engine. If the teacher has pre-searched the sites, the students are less likely to go astray.

WebQuests are the brainchild of Bernie Dodge working with Tom March at San Diego State University with the first pages published in the mid 1990s they have gone on to become very popular ways to use the Internet in teaching, with thousands of good examples published on several websites. The websites of the originators are good places to start collecting information: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_webquests.html and http://www.ozline.com/learning/index.htm. (Don’t type the underline if you type these addresses into your browser). Almost all of the information that I have found on WebQuests is, not surprisingly,

found on the Internet rather than in paper resources.

True WebQuests are carefully structured Internet experiences that go beyond the Internet teaching strategies listed above. Like a self-service unit plan, they will set students on specific paths and allow them to understand why what they are doing is worth doing. Like a well done unit plan they are fairly intense on the preparation side, but, since they quickly become very student-centered, they require mostly teacher encouragement and guidance after they are initiated, rather than continuing teacher as “sage on the stage.”

WebQuests are technically easy to create and don’t require any special software or programming skills, although they do require a way to publish your work to a school website, one of a number of free website publishers on the Internet or to a disk (CD or Floppy). Most office suites, Microsoft Office, Apple Works, or Star Office, for example, allow a person to save a word processing document as a webpage. Netscape Communicator, from very early versions to the latest Mozilla/ Netscape 6.2.X versions all come with Composer, which is an extremely easy to use WYSIWYG, pronounced “wizeewig,” (What You See Is What You Get) webpage creator.

The introduction or engaging opening has two important functions: it sets the stage for the WebQuest, informing the users what is coming and what their general role in the process will be; and it sets up a scenario that adds authenticity and excitement by connecting the activity to the user’s world. Many good WebQuest introductions create a fictionalized situation where participants are key decision makers in some important sounding process, engaging the participants with a game-like atmosphere. The introduction tells you who you are in relation to the assignment. According to WebQuest innovator Bernie Dodge introductions should be:

        �       relevant to the learner's past experience
�        relevant to the learner's future goals
�       attractive, visually interesting
�       important because of its global implications
�       urgent, because of the need for a timely solution
�       fun, because the learner will be playing a role or making something (Dodge).

This section outlines the question or questions that the users will answer and clearly describes the product or outcome that is expected. After listing several specific questions group members need to answer, a WebQuest Task Segment might, for example, say, “Your group will create a ten minute Power Point presentation to be presented to the Seven Eleven Corporation to let them know whether or not your group believes that live bears should be used in convenience stores to promote Big Gulps.” This section may also suggest that individuals be assigned to specific questions or parts of questions.

The Process section lists the specific roles of group members and may make suggestions as to how to choose which member assumes which role. Ideally, the roles will create a situation where group members view the question from different perspectives, or points of view, or have something unique to contribute to the process, which creates strong interdependence among the members. This section also describes the steps through which groups will complete their tasks. In short term WebQuests, the steps are often very specific; longer term WebQuests can allow more creativity as to how the task will be accomplished. The Process segment is also where advice to students can be dispensed. For example, if the instructions tell students to “brainstorm” a list of important questions about a topic and brainstorming is not a routine activity in your classroom, the Process segment would provide suggestions about how to set up a brainstorming session. This section can also lay out the schedule for specific parts of the WebQuest and make any due dates that occur in the activity clear.

The Resources section provides a list of possible resources that have been previewed by the teacher. It is very important that the resources are checked by the teacher just before the WebQuest is started. Links need to be checked to be sure they are still active, books and other resources need to be checked to be sure they are still available. This is particularly important if you are using someone else’s WebQuest (including the one included in the lessons below) The Internet is a very dynamic entity; things change, webpages move to new addresses or cease to exist altogether. When creating links to your resources it is a good idea to use absolute links, that is, the complete address of the page even if the page is on your own Internet site. That way if you share your WebQuest with other teachers, the links will still work. If a webpage is absolutely critical to your lesson, get permission from the creator to capture it in a way that it can be distributed to your students, placing it on a school web server or in a website that you control. Using a WebQuest should not limit your resources to those found on the Internet. Using a WebQuest should be a broadening experience for students, not a narrowing one.

In this section students will receive feedback as to how they are doing. Rubrics are often included here along with checklists for self evaluation.

The conclusion summarizes the accomplishments of the participants and ties the activities back to the task. It may also suggest real world extensions for the lesson and give students a chance to reflect on the WebQuest process and possibly offer suggestions for refining the WebQuest in its next iteration.

The unit will be taught from a long-term WebQuest along with auxiliary or mini-lessons (which will be published on the Jefferson Middle School Internet site at http://www.jms.aps.edu/firstamericans.html). Students will be divided into Expert groups on sub topics within an essential question of, “Who were the first Americans, when and how did they arrive?”

Possible groups: Native Origin Story Group, Ice Age Group, Stone Tool Group, Ice Age Animals Group, Lifeway of Ice Age People Group, Kennewick Controversy Group Careers Studying Ancient People Group…

As well as experiencing a WebQuest first hand, students will learn how to create web resources and basic webpage creation techniques.

Ultimately the groups will rejoin, debrief and create Internet resources for younger students. They will acquire their knowledge through a contrived scenario, but apply that knowledge in the real world.

(Depending on how this is published, it may actually function as a WebQuest; the links may work. ATI may include the actual WebQuest, or a link to the actual WebQuest on the Jefferson Middle School Website.)

On one hand, people are really worried about global warming; on the other hand, ice ages have been more common than warm periods in the past two million years or so. There are some scientists that believe that although global warming is something to worry about in the short run, eventually the climate will become significantly colder than it is now and it is possible that glaciers will return to populated parts of North America.

Your team of experts has been hired by the CWNC, the Coalition of Worried Northern Cities, a group of mayors and city managers from Canada and the northern United States who believe that their cities need to be prepared for the coming of a new ice age. Your job is to learn about ice ages and share your research the with CWNC so that they can make reasonable choices for their cities

Using the resources available to you, the library, the Internet, your textbooks, communications with experts, magazines and newspapers… you are to research the topic of ice ages. After researching the topic your team will prepare a presentation (the choice of technology for the presentation is up to you) to a meeting of the CWNC. The CWNC would like for you to answer the following questions as well as make suggestions to them about dealing with the ice age that they think is coming. Divide the questions among your group members.

1. How often have glaciers advanced and retreated in during the current ice age (the last 2,000,000,000 years or so)?

4. How far south in North America did the last glaciation come? List 6 Major cities that would be affected if the ice came that far south again.

6. What have glaciers got to do with “exotic” rocks, rocks that are found a long way from where they belong?

11. If there was another ice age where would there be new beach front property?

14. Were people around during the last ice age? If there were how did they survive?

The first thing your group needs to do is brainstorm a list of things that you already know about ice ages; I’ll bet that within your group there are already some good ideas about ice ages and what causes them. Your research will help make you more confident about what you already know and put you back on the right path if your ideas are off base. While you’re brainstorming your list it is okay to write down all the ideas even if they seem goofy at the time. If you want to use an organizing tool like an outline or a web to record your ideas, that would be encouraged. In any case, save your brainstorming. You will have three weeks to complete your project, but you may not have the whole class period, every day in class. Each member of your group will have a specific question that they are responsible for answering. If one person has their question answered early, they can help another group member who is having trouble or work on learning how to use Power Point, AppleWorks Slide Show, video or whatever technology your group decides to use to present your findings. You may use whatever resources you can find to help with your presentation, but further down this page you will find a “Resources” section that has several websites and a couple of books listed that will help you to answer your questions. As you read and research make a list of new words that you encounter in case you have to explain some of them to the CWNC during your presentation.

      1.    Do you have a copy of the “brainstorming”?
2.    Are all the questions answered?
3.    Did you create a vocabulary list?
4.    Have all group members cooperated and contributed to the presentation?
5.    Do you have a presentation ready to make recommendations to CWNC?
6.    Have you practiced what you are going to say?

Congratulations, the NWNC appreciates your input and will be better able to make decisions about how to protect their cities in the event of an ice age. We now enter phase two of our project. After you have reversed roles and been the audience for your classmates’ presentations, you will have learned a lot about the first Americans, the times they lived in, the tools they used, the animals they shared the continent with, how they have been studied, how their descendants have been treated, and more. In the second phase you will design ways to use technology to share this information with elementary students. For example, if you think the “virtual field trip” is a good activity you could create something like that for younger students.

Introduction: The idea of race has factored strongly in the treatment and study of Native Americans and in the study of culture in general. The following story and recommended video, do not relate directly to the interactions between Euro-American anthropologists, but do point out that the ideas of race common in America are by no means universal.

While living briefly in Saudi Arabia in 1971, I happened to have a conversation with two Saudi princes (there were lots of them; an American teenager whose father was a military officer talking to a young Saudi prince was not a big deal). The subject up for discussion was racism, particularly in America and England, where these young men had been educated. They had no problem understanding discrimination, based on parentage, or wealth, or education, but simply could not understand the concept of racial discrimination based on physical characteristics, particularly skin color. In terms of what we might call race, the Saudis are a very diverse people, the royal family possibly more so than the general population because of centuries of politically arranged marriages. These young men, who were at least cousins looked very different; one could have easily been European, with very pale skin, the other had skin darker than most African Americans, but looked much more like people that I have met from India and one of their cousins, who is now the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, looked very much like the famous boxer Muhammad Ali. I could see their point. How could they possibly be a different race from their close relatives? The video listed in the lesson below makes the Saudi’s point even clearer by having two characters, locked in racial battle, who do not fit in any racial category that we or the Enterprise crew recognize.

Using the following quotes as an attention getter: “A person’s race tells one much about them. Many of their abilities and weaknesses are determined by their race.” and/or “A person’s race depends mostly on the experience and prejudices of the observer.” Modified slightly from Samuel George Morton, Franz Boas, and David Hurst Thomas, three highly-educated anthropologists from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Have students write briefly about what race means to them. Ask if they think attitudes on about race have changed in the last 200 years. Do they consider whatever group they seem on the surface to belong to as a race?

Show the Star Trek Video, Let this be Your Last Battlefield. Re-ask the above questions. Talk about how the belief in race might affect the study of who the first Americans were.

As research progresses it would be a good idea to do some mini-lessons on presentation skills. Basic web page creation using Netscape Composer and how to do a Power Point presentation might be titles worth considering. If no one at your site is confident in teaching presentation skills, doing a Web search on either of those titles would produce online tutorials that students could go through on their own.

AAA (American Anthropology Association). “AAA Statement on Race,” Anthropology
Newsletter. September, 1998.

Chatters, James C. Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans. New York : Simon and Schuster, 2001.

**Cranby, Thomas. “The Search for the First Americans.” National Geographic. Vol. 156 (1979) 330-363.

Good article. Kid accessible. Also available on the National Geographic website.

Darwin Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The
Preservation of Favored Race in The Struggle for Life. New York: Modern Library, 1993.

Delorria, Vine. Custer Died For Your Sins. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

The Late 60s manifesto of “red power.” Funny, provocative, a very different look at
NativeAmericans and their interactions with Euro-Americans.

Dixon, E.James. Bones, Boats and Bison. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Totally misleading title. Should be called, Stone Tools, More Stone Tools, Radiocarbon Dates, and Oh, By the Way, Maybe boats. Dixon’s whole thesis about Native Americans arriving by boat is presented in the concluding 13 pages of the book. The previous 241 pages present a tedious, but informative and detailed list of many important Paleo-American
archaeological sites, who found them, what was found, how old the discoverers think the site is and why other people don’t believe them.

Faichney, Gavin. “WebQuest: A Strategy for teaching SOSE Online,” Ethos P-6, 2002 Term 1, Vol. 10 Issue 1, p9.

**Gonick, Larry. The Cartoon History of the Universe. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Henderson, Diedtra. “Researchers Uncover Signs of Areas Earliest Settlers.” Seattle Times. October 27, 1998.

**Kepecs, Susan. “Mammoth for Dinner.” Archaeology. New York:Vol 55 no 5, July/August, 2002.

** “Illinois State Museum.” “Ice Age” 1998. Illinois State Museum. Accessed 7/8/2002
<http://museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/>

         Animation of last ice age + ice age info. Great site!

Montastersky, R. “Drowned Land Holds Clue to First Americans.” Science News vol.157
issue 6 02/05/2000: 85.

A very complete website from one of the originators of the WebQuest.

Parfit, Michael. “The Hunt for the First Americans.”National Geographic,vol. 198 no. 6, Dec. 2000: 41- 67.

A very interesting and complete article about the recent discoveries in American archaeology. Good illustrations, great map, and several Native American oral history quotes.

Good kids book on the forces that shaped the earth, particularly ice. Easy vocabulary, lots of slick photos.

Pough, F. Harvey, John Heiser, William McFarland. Vertebrate Life. New York: Macmillan Publishing,1989. Biology Text Book.

** Star Trek: Let this be Your Last Battlefield. writ. Oliver Crawford, prod. Gene Rodenberry, Videocassette. Paramount Pictures Corp, 1988.

Willey,Gordon G. , Jeremy A. Sablof. A History of American Archaeology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1993.

Whitaker, John. Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

An excellent “How To” book on making stone tools, some history and background, good safety tips.

	Unsatisfactory	Needs Work	Complete	Excellent
Team has used time effectively.	frequently off task, and arguing, downloading music, and/or playing around	Slow getting started. Scanning sites for information but sometimes off track.	Most time spent in appropriate research. Ample time to finish presentation.	Planned ahead. Organized and divided tasks. Enthusiastic and on task.
Brainstorming	No brainstorming.	Talked about topic, but only recorded partial results.	Brainstormed several clear ideas and recorded them completely.	Explored their prior knowledge thoroughly and used organizing tools.
Answered Questions	Several questions blank or incomplete.	Most questions answered, some questions answered very briefly.	Complete answers to all questions.	Complete thoughtful answers to all questions.
Presentations well thought out and interesting.	Presentation incomplete, read word for word from paper, no attempt to be “in character.” No technology.	Mostly complete presentation, presented with little imagination and no media tools.	Complete presentation, all members contributed, roles played, but without enthusiasm. Technology used conventionally.	Complete sentences.Group members enthusiastic and “into” their role. Creative use of technology. Interesting solutions offered beyond just answering the questions.