On Saturday, November 22 1997 the ARF Outreach Program sponsored a workshop entitled "Archaeology and Popular Mythology of the Ancient Near East". The workshop was co-sponsored by ASOR (American Schools for Oriental Research) and held in conjunction with their annual meetings. Many K-12 Bay Area teachers and educators attended the workshop where they heard presentations from numerous Near Eastern scholars. The workshop's focus was to inform educators on recent archaeological work in the Near East and to give them ideas of ways they could incorporate this research into their curriculum plans. The presentations were aimed at helping teachers present their students with accurate information dispelling ideas and misinformation which students often learn from the popular press, television, and movies. The afternoon segment of the workshop was a "hands-on" program where teachers prepared a classroom based excavation project and explored ways in which they could further incorporate archaeology into their daily lessons. The ARF Outreach Program plans to sponsor more of these workshops which bring archaeologists together with K-12 educators in order to improve archaeological education at the pre-collegiate level.

Visit to Live Oaks School in San Francisco

On Monday February 9th ARF Outreach coordinator, Sonya Suponcic visited the Live Oaks School's 6th grade classrooms in San Francisco. The students at Live Oaks were excited to hear about the recent excavations of the 9,000 year old Neolithic tell site of Catalhoyuk, Turkey. After seeing a slide presentation of the work being done by B.A.C.H. (Berkeley Archaeologists at Catalhoyuk) the 6th graders engaged in a brainstorming activity in which they used their imaginations and critical thinking skills to hypothesize about what the daily lives of people living at Catalhoyuk might have been like and about the ways in which people there were using the raw materials available to them such as clay and obsidian. In the second half of the visit each student participated in a "Mini-Dig" in which they excavated, mapped, and recorded numerous artifacts before interpreting them in a class-wide discussion.