GEOS 220: Environmental History of Southwest
Outside Activities
Outside activity #1:
Crossdating Tree Rings by Skeleton PlottingAccess this activity on the web through this page.
First, read the explanatory pages that lead up to the fun page: Try skeleton plotting for yourself.
When you succeed at crossdating a virtual sample:
- Make it obvious that you succeeded:
- Line up your winning skeleton plot with the master chronology
- Put the plots as far right as possible, but still visible
- Show the answer box
- Set the core magnification at 1x
- Put a part of the core that has highly variable ring growth in full view
- Capture an image of the crossdating applet:
- For PC users, do an "alt-print screen" to take a snapshot of the screen.
- For Macintosh users with OS X, there are two options for importing a screen shot into your word processor.
- Press this combination of keys: crtl+cmnd+shift+4. This will turn the mouse icon into a cross hairs with which you can select the portion of the screen which you wish to capture.
- Use the "grab" application. The easiest way to locate it is to open spotlight and type grab. Since this is an application, it will be separated from documents that contain words, etc.
- Open your favorite word processor.
- Edit-Paste Special into a document.
- Re-size the image to be reasonable.
- Fill in page with text (should be about ½-page typed) about dendrochronological crossdating.
- The explanatory pages have many pearls of wisdom in this regard.
- For example, in what cases might a tree-ring sample not be crossdateable?
- Writing tip #1: Avoid first-person sentence subjects:
- Instead of: I or we (also the vague subject, "one") can crossdate tree-ring samples.
- Try: Tree-ring samples can be crossdated.
- Writing tip #2: Avoid superfluous third-person subjects doing stuff:
- Instead of: Dendrochronologists (or English majors) can crossdate tree-ring samples.
- Try: Tree-ring samples are crossdateable.
- One page total (with your figure).
- Due Tuesday, Sep. 12, 2023, in D2L.
Outside activity #2:
Arizona State MuseumThe University of Arizona has many museums, most of which are on the main campus and are free of charge to students. In this activity, please visit the Arizona State Museum in order to learn about human-environment interactions in the Southwest. The actual assignment is as follows:
2022 Note: The Paths of Life exhibit at the Arizona State Museum is now permanently closed. See below for new suggestions for what to focus on for this activity.
- The Museum is on the north side of University Blvd, across the street from Centennial Hall and west of Old Main.
- Museum hours are 10-4 PM on Tuesday–Saturday; closed Sunday.
- Admission to the museum is free for UA people, including students. Bring your Cat Card.
- For this activity, check out current exhibits that are relevant to EHSW. For example:
- The mammoth bone bed and Pleistocene megafauna diorama: an obvious focus for EHSW.
- The pottery exhibit: the Bridging of the Gap made educated guesses on where to search based on pottery sequences shown on the wall.
- The basketry exhibit: basketry is not emphasized in EHSW, but it does represent practical and creative activities of Indigenous cultures.
Required: 1-page essay, typed, single- or double-spaced, your choice.
Graded on depth and writing.
- Use more than one paragraph
- Don't forget a topic sentence for each paragraph
- As usual in this course, try writing completely without any first-person "I" or "we"
- Also, it's not necessary to include the word people, as in the Hopi people
- One more time: No quoting in this class, ever
Due Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, in D2L.
Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721 USA
Comments to Paul Sheppard: sheppard @ ltrr.arizona.edu
Copyright © 2001-2022, Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona
Revised — November, 2022
