Dr. Jake Fox, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Radford University made a special visit to Belle Heth Elementary recently.
He met with 6th graders and presented information about the importance of archaeology. Students learned why archaeology is an important study as it pertains to learning about past peoples and their cultures. The students were allowed to handle a wide variety of artifacts from all over the globe, including some from Southwest Virginia. The artifacts included They included:
Pottery from Woodland Period (about 1000 BC to about 1500 AD). The archaeological sites were in the NRV and Southwestern Virginia (most of the Woodland Period collections were excavated over the last 20 years by my Radford University professor Cliff Boyd)
Stone tools from Woodland Period sites
Stone tools from two Late Paleolithic (about 20,000 to 50,000 years ago) sites in the country of Jordan, where Fox excavated in the late 1990’s.
Animal bone (especially skulls) from one historic period site in Southwestern Virginia, and a few others that we purchased for teaching purposes
Thomas Grant, a 6th grader at Belle Heth said, “I like all the artifacts he presented.”
Fox said that coming to the school provided the students with a new way of learning about history.
“As for the power/value of making a visit like this, I can say just a few things. First, I know from my daughter that our schools do a very good job teaching students about what happened in the past. In an event like this, I hope to reach another level of thinking with students. I want to help them begin to understand just how do know what happened? In that talk I’m hoping to interest them not only in what happened, but how we can use evidence to hypothesize about the past.
“The other thing that I hope to accomplish in an event like this is to help students get beyond “words”. I want them to see that the past is real, and we can actually touch part of it. In my classrooms and in public events at Radford University, I’ve seen it again and again. You can tell people in words, slides, pictures, etc., how interesting the cultures of the past are. But when you place a stone tool in that person’s hand and tell them that it was made and used by people 40,000 years ago, well… Those eyes light right up! For a lot of people, when you touch something, it becomes a lot more real.”
Fox said that the visit is another example of the benefit Radford Univeristy and other Universities can have on local schools.
–Sam Wall
