Archaeology - Creating a Culture

(Group activities with individual components)

Creating a Civilization:

• Teams of students studied cultural universals which represent a society, such as government, economics, attitude toward the unknown, ethics and values. 
• They then did "backward" archaeology by creating a civilization in the past, present, or future, and deciding which cultural universals were the most important to that society. Each team member made artifacts which would best represent those aspects of their society. 
•  They also created a written language, leaving behind a "Rosetta Stone" with their culture's language, English, and Latin (for extra credit!) on it, and artifacts with only their language on them.

• Soon another team will try to interpret their artifacts, and make inferences about what was important to their culture.