Features
Making the past present
While UIS' Lynn Fisher is fascinated by what happened archaeologically
10,000 years ago, she also wants her students to apply the experience of
the distant past to the present.
"For example, we can look at how past societies affected their environments when they plowed their fields or dug their basements," says the associate professor of sociology/anthropology. "Archeology teaches us how day-to-day life in the past affected the land over long periods."
To bring this home to her i-Pod-toting students, she likes to literally get them out into the field locally in Illinois where she says, "there's plenty of fascinating archeology."
Her academic research also takes her to Southern Germany, where she's investigating the transition from ancient hunter-gatherer societies to the first farmers. She's taken UIS students there twice on month-long digs and will be part of a big multi-university National Science Foundation-funded project there next summer that Fisher calls a "doozie."
"Doing international research is a good way to get your assumptions questioned," she says, talking about both herself and her students. "And doing archeology is a fabulous way to travel.
"Students live and work in one place and see things tourists and even
study-abroad students don’t. This is most of our students' first international
experience. They're doing fieldwork and lab work, learning some German,
getting their complacencies overturned and having new ideas."
She balances her students' fieldwork with lots of writing. "I have my students formulate and write about questions that interest them, such as their hometown's archeological history."
Last fall, Fisher was named a University Scholar, one of 16 from the U of I's three campuses.
"That was tremendous and so pleasing because you're nominated by your peers," she says of the award. It comes with $30,000 of research support over three years from the U of I Foundation.
—Mike Lillich
Learn more>> Fisher named University Scholar; Fisher's field course