This site provides information and resources about a project that has
created a Digital Learning Environment to help undergraduate students
visualize complex archaeological data in time and space, and explore how
archaeologists reconstruct diverse patterns of ancient human behavior
changing through time from these data.

In 1996, Dr. Jeanne Sept, Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University,
and Dr. Martin Siegel, Professor of Education at Indiana University and
Chairman and Chief Learning Officer of WisdomTools, Inc., a software
company associated with Indiana University, began initial work on a
software tool that would let students use the Internet to help visualize
archaeological information in new ways.

With two years of support from the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH), followed by three years of support from the U.S. Department of
Education (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, FIPSE) we
have designed a Web-based visualization tool called "TimeWeb" that allows
students to query a complex relational database on African archaeology, and
and examine the time/space relationships of the archaeological materials
that they find. Students can display the search results chronologically on
a dynamic time scale; they can quickly zoom in and out of time, and examine
data from several perspectives and resolutions. They can also display the
sites on different maps of Africa, and in several other formats to help
them compare different aspects of the data in different ways. The
"Prehistoric Puzzles" website contains additional information and web-based
activities to help students learn to approach problem-solving like
archaeologists.

All faculty teaching introductory survey courses face a dilemma: how to
give students a broad overview of the fundamental issues in a field while
at the same time engaging them in problem-solving, using the analytical
methods of their discipline. We hope that our Prehistoric Puzzles website
and TimeWeb learning tool can help model an innovative strategy for
creating effective, active learning opportunities for archaeology students
in many different kinds of classes.