Domestic Programs
Frontiers of Environment and Culture: New Mexico Field Course
Students attend 8 hours of classroom preparation on Rhodes’ campus before departing for a two-week field course in New Mexico. Participants explore strategies of sustainability across time and across cultures. Find out how people in this arid region located, distributed, and preserved scarce resources such as water. Discover what their dwellings can tell us about their approach to natural resource use. Learn what these strategies suggest about their cultural values. Explore how these strategies evolved in response to their changing physical and cultural environments. A comparison will be made of the life ways of prehistoric Chacoan peoples, Apache, Spanish colonies, Mexican homesteaders, and American traders. Students will explore how these peoples were transformed by encounters between cultures. A service learning project while in New Mexico is also required. Students earn three hours of credit as Rhodes ID 250.
