This curriculum was originally developed for Horizon's Alternative School, a kindergarten through 8th grade school in Boulder Colorado. The archaeology project was funded through a science grant donated by Amgen and chosen through the Boulder Valley Apple Foundation's Excellence in Education award.

The class was taught to 2nd through 8th graders as part of an Ancient Civilizations curriculum. This archaeology class is a method of teaching history and culture to students via the use of simulated archaeological excavations depicting sites from the five ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Israel, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

These sites follow five distinct time periods of each civilization from their neo-lithic period up to approximately 300 AD. These periods were chosen to reflect pivotal changes of each culture through war, environmental impacts, trade, immigration, and technical innovation. The class has been considered a successful and innovative method of self directed, experiential education by participating students and teacher observers.

There has been much interest in the class and teachers have requested information on how they could recreate this learning experience for their students. The challenge in doing so is that the course curriculum has been very dependent on the teacher having anoverview of archaeology, anthropology, some knowledge of the history of the cultures and how they interrelated through time. The course is time intensive to set up and requires a lot of preparation for pertinent prerequisite knowledge. To ease the burden of aquiring such diverse background knowledge I have tried to organize and index what I thought was pertinent to teaching the class and reference it related to the projectartifacts and easily available timelines. I have also archived my lesson plans with extensive teacher guidelines as well as given supporting linksfor continued review.

It is my hope that as the curriculum is more widely circulated in this web format it will provide an innovative model of how to augment teaching history for any interested instructor. If you have any comments or questions please contact me at
http://kim_hansen@ceo.cudenver.edu.

Regards,
Kim Hansen
Masters Candidate
Information Learning Technologies
University of Colorado, Denver