Introduction
There are two broad learning objectives for this course. The first is to give advanced undergraduate anthropology students a comprehensive background in the archaeology of a specific region including the historical development of archaeological work in the area, the culture history of the region, and the character of current research related to interpreting and understanding human behavior in the region during the last 12,000 years. The second broad objective is to expose students to the role of archaeology in contemporary resource management including an introduction to fundamental cultural resource law, cultural resource management practices, and the role of modern Indians and other affected people. The course focuses on the local region. Most students will come to the class with some prior knowledge of the geography and recent history of the region and it is intended that they will leave the class with a greater appreciation of the long culture history and diversity of the region. This knowledge will allow them to better enjoy, and participate in public decisions about, the regions cultural resources.

About the Course
This course is an upper-division course offered by the Department of Anthropology. Time and Culture in the Northwest was originally called Archaeology of Washington. It has been taught since the early 1990s. The name was changed in 2002 to reflect the broader geographic focus of the course.

The course was originally intended to offer under graduate anthropology majors an opportunity to study the prehistory of a specific geographical region in more detail than that allowed in a broader survey of New World or North American prehistory. In particular it was intended to serve those students who might be interested in pursuing graduate work in archaeology who needed more instruction in the history, method and theory, and goals of archaeology. Thus the course offered more detailed coverage of aspects of archaeology not often included in broader survey courses. This included such things as the effects of events in the history of the discipline such as the rise of modern cultural resource management, discussion of specific case studies related to artifact classification and dating, understanding the development and application of at least one cultural historical sequence, and a survey of specific, current, problem oriented issues.

During the first few years the course was offered it became apparent that at least half of the students who enrolled in the course were not anthropology majors. Rather they were students from a broad range of majors including; geology, education, communications, history, and Comparative American Cultures, who choose the course as a non-GER elective. It was also noted that there were at least a few students of Plateau Indian descent who took the course. These students taught us that there was a significant interest in the topic because of its focus on local history and prehistory and these students were taking the course because the places and people discussed were important to their own sense of who they were. Also important was the purely chance association of a broadly reported, very controversial issue —the Kennewick Man Case—with the course topic such that even if discussion of contemporary socio-political issues in archaeology wasn’t planned for the course, the students raised a number of questions about these topics during class discussions.

Therefore, within the context of the SAA\NSF MATRIX project, the goal has become to find a way to make the course adequately serve both undergraduate anthropology majors who may be pursuing graduate work in archaeology and students who have an interest in the topic because of its local focus. Changes included not only modifications to the organization of the course but seeking a name change to reflect a broader geographic area, a different catalog description, GER status, and different prerequisites.

The new catalog description says the course will cover; The archaeologically reconstructed environmental and cultural past of the Northwest including contemporary scientific and social approaches and issues. This description is intended to communicate that archaeological approaches are different from the approaches of history or ethnography and that archaeology is not just about past Indian cultures. It is also intended to impart that the place of archaeological resources in contemporary land management, and the multiplicity of views of what these resources mean and how they should be treated will be considered by the course. The description also demonstrates that the course will have a geographic focus on the northwest.

The course is scheduled to meet for three fifty minute sessions each week. The format includes a significant amount of traditional lecture style instruction but also includes multiple opportunities for one-on-one conversation with the instructor, a significant hands-on project, and a day off campus visiting sites and meeting Indian individuals who are active in contemporary Native American programs for cultural resources. There are assigned readings each week including materials in the required text book as well as additional articles. The course work includes a traditional significant term research paper, two major exams that will incorporate objective and short essay questions, and two major individual and group projects that have been added to increase level of active participation of each student.

The first project is a readings journal that consists of writing brief summary statements about each of the assigned readings that is submitted to the instructor on a weekly basis. The content and presentation may be commented on but is not graded. Students who turn in the journal assignments will get the allocated points, students who do not, won’t. This assignment, which students are encouraged to submit via email, will give an opportunity for one-on-one conversations with the instructor as well as incentive to keep up on the reading assignments.

The second activity is a group project. The class will be divided into groups of 4-5 people. Each group will be given a scenario packet. The packet will contain the description of a situation in which a known site has been identified as being in the area of a proposed development project of some kind. The nature of the impact and all other resource concerns, such as fish and wild life, water quality, or Tribal concerns will be identified. The packet will also contain references in the regional ‘grey’ literature that describe the site and work done at the site in the past. The job of the student group will be to prepare a cultural resource management plan for the site. Examples of such documents will be available on the class web site. They will have to prepare an overview statement that describes the site and the history of work done at the site, determine if the site is eligible to the National Register of Historic Places, what the potential impacts associated with the proposed activity might be, and then submit several alternative actions that the agency might take with regard to the site. Each of the teams products will be posted on the class web site. We will also spend one class day discussing each of the teams projects. The scenarios will be built on real cases that have been prepared by various local agency cultural resource managers. At the time of the class discussion the real world agency decisions will be revealed and compared with those prepared by each of the groups. The instructor will have intentionally drawn on cases that in the real world resulted in both satisfactory and unsatisfactory outcomes.

The course is broken into six general parts. The first part, which occurs during weeks 1 through 3, begins with a very broad overview of the natural and cultural history of the New World since the end of the last ice age that sets the context for discussions about the Northwest. This is followed by coverage of the history of archaeological work in the region with an emphasis on how this history is closely tied to the growth and development of the region.

The second part, weeks 4 through 7 addresses the environmental and cultural history of the region including the Northwest Coast and the southern Plateau. Specific sites, artifact types, and cultural historical sequences are covered.

Weeks 8 through 11 (including a week of spring break) deal with how archaeologists use archaeological information to interpret human behavior. The study of economic systems through analysis of subsistence and trade, the study of social organization through analysis of houses, and cemeteries—with a special focus on slavery and warfare—is examined. Again, specific sites and models relating to the northwest are presented.

Weeks 12 and 13 are dedicated to discussions of work in the northwest that has focused on the historic period. Included are sites associated with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Also included are sites associated with Asian-American and Afro-American sites, a segment of the regional history that most students have no prior awareness of.

The final portion of the course is devoted to discussion of contemporary cultural and political issues associated with cultural resources. In particular, on-going litigation and regional projects involving Native American participation in the management of cultural resources will be reviewed.