Archeoastronomy is the study of how ancient civilizations were influenced by the movement and appearance of stars and galaxies. Many ancient civilizations had very sophisticated systems for observations, calculations and prediction of the movements of stars. Many of the major structures of these civilizations were devoted to the study of the heavens.

This unit is the culmination of study by these astronomy students and this project has a requirement to tell the story of an ancient civilizations use of the stars and planets in their every day lives.

We start with new information on culture. It is not meant to be a cultural anthology course, but the ALE will give the students an idea of how difficult it is to infer processes of civilizations that no longer exist. As always the ALE is a self directed course of study and by now the students are more comfortable with this personal acquisition of knowledge rather than the stand and deliver lecture style.

The next part is broken into three parts. we will first look at the culture of the middle ages. This is because it is far enough back in time that most student are not exposed to information from school, it provides a topic that has several misconceptions regarding it, and I have several excellent sources of information on it. The students will select on of 14 concpepts and create a poster that describes the values, beliefs and norms for four attributes of that concept.

The second project is a time capsule that describes how they as teenagers would like to be seen by anthropologists 150 years in the future. They will select from a set of universal cultural concepts, again setting a value, belief and norms for each of the four concepts.

The last project is a presentation on one of ten cultures. They will look at how astronomy influenced the everyday life of the citizens. The student teams will draw upon all of what they have learned and deliver this as the final.

• ALE Culture
• culture concepts
• mideval project
• time capsule project
• project archeoastronomy
• ref cultural presentation