Barnard College
AC-5: Immersive Experience

Professor Severin Fowles offers an immersive summer experience involving archaeological fieldwork in New Mexico. A crew of 15 students works intensively on precolonial farming landscapes and active water rights cases in Picuris Pueblo, NM for 6 weeks each summer. Through an NSF grant, this is a non-tuition-based program.

Students document the history of traditional dry-farming and acequia-farming practices in northern New Mexico, working in collaboration with local indigenous and Hispano communities. Students learn about indigenous philosophies of care for the landscape and Hispano notions of "thinking like a watershed," while gathering data on pre-colonial and early colonial agricultural features to be used in water rights cases by Picuris Pueblo. Students who participate in the program live in a small rural agricultural community in an arid landscape where consciousness about the local use of resources is of paramount concern. Local histories of acequia activism and indigenous land and water struggles permeate life the community and are incorporated into the curriculum through readings, interviews, and community work projects like traditional mudding of (highly sustainable) adobe buildings at Picuris Pueblo.

EESC BC3029 Bermuda Case Studies in Environmental Sustainability: This course, taught by professors Martin Stute and Terryanne Maenza-Gmelch, focuses on the ecology, geology, and sustainability of Bermuda. Students will explore the local flora, fauna, geology and hydrology of various habitats in the context of environmental change brought on by issues such as climate change, invasive species, disease, and development. Classes will meet during the spring semester at Barnard in preparation for a field trip to Bermuda for five days during spring break.