Related Galleries
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Dr. Bill Schindler teamed up with Kevin McKinney, Chef/Owner of Brooks Tavern restaurant in Chestertown, to demonstrate how to butcher a pig in preparation for a multi-course meal in his “Food, People, & The Planet” class. -
Assistant Professor of Anthropology Bill Schindler shows students in his Experimental Archaeology class how to use primitive technology in food production by making stone tools and using them to skin and butcher four deer donated by alumni Katie Eckenrode ’11 and Doug Pfaff ’10. -
Students in Dr. Bill Schindler’s Human Evolution course met at the outdoor classroom to make and use 2.5 million year old tools for bone extraction, chopping wood, cutting leather, and peeling roots.
Interpreting the Past
The ethical, political, and economic factors influencing how our history is portrayed
Summer 2012
During this 3-week course Washington College students were immersed in the interpretation of the past by exposure to various institutions, researchers, re-enactors, actors, scientists, archaeologists, historians, and staff that are responsible for this important role. Students visited and were given “behind the scene tours” of a variety of museums (the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum in Copenhagen), open-air museums (Williamsburg, Lejre: Land of Legends in Denmark, the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum in Denmark), conservation labs (Winterthur, MAC lab), Medieval Times, a Society for Creative Anachronism group, a civil war re-enactment group, an international primitive technology gathering (the Athraa gathering); and, learned in a lecture/discussion format. After spending a considerable amount of time learning about how the past was interpreted to them, the students embarked on a culminating experience where they were required to put into practice all that they had learned by becoming interpreters themselves. During the final fours days of the course, students inhabited a reconstructed Iron Age Village, cooked and ate only period correct food, wore period correct dress, and use only period correct tools while interpreting Iron Age life to the public.
Summer 2012
During this 3-week course Washington College students were immersed in the interpretation of the past by exposure to various institutions, researchers, re-enactors, actors, scientists, archaeologists, historians, and staff that are responsible for this important role. Students visited and were given “behind the scene tours” of a variety of museums (the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum in Copenhagen), open-air museums (Williamsburg, Lejre: Land of Legends in Denmark, the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum in Denmark), conservation labs (Winterthur, MAC lab), Medieval Times, a Society for Creative Anachronism group, a civil war re-enactment group, an international primitive technology gathering (the Athraa gathering); and, learned in a lecture/discussion format. After spending a considerable amount of time learning about how the past was interpreted to them, the students embarked on a culminating experience where they were required to put into practice all that they had learned by becoming interpreters themselves. During the final fours days of the course, students inhabited a reconstructed Iron Age Village, cooked and ate only period correct food, wore period correct dress, and use only period correct tools while interpreting Iron Age life to the public.
Leslie Grigsby and Bruno Puliot discuss the ethical issues surrounding the differences between conservation and restoration during a presenting at Winterthur’s Ceramics and Glass study.
