Course Description

This Legacy class is part of the Honors College’s Triad of Inquiry courses taught along with Professors Faubion and Moore (see their course descriptions here and here). Students in these three courses are given the unique opportunity to explore how different faculty from different disciplines conduct inquiry and research by registering for one course as a home section—this one with Dr.  Troy Lovata—and studying with all three faculty members at different times over the semester. Your education revolves around disciplines. You may move from English to Biology to Music to Philosophy and never the twain shall meet. As Honors students, though, we hope you’ll strive to do more and take on some of the world’s problems by bringing together expertise to solve them, which isn’t typically the way that education works. In this course you will gain a foundation in the skills and approaches of communication, critical thinking, creative thinking. Because one Honors instructor will likely not provide you with the breadth of viewpoints to develop those skills, this course will be taught by three. You’ll then be tasked to bring together these different perspectives and starting to think as interdisciplinarians.

This particular triad focuses on different ways that human beings can develop meaning. Over the course of three segments you will begin to learn how meaning is developed in literature, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. This section is centered in the social sciences of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Cultural Geography and focused on how place reflects and impacts culture and how material culture reflects what people do and believe. We’ll see how scholars study material culture and how they examine landscapes for evidence of human activity from prehistory to present specifically in New Mexico. There will be a required, day-long, weekend field trip along the Rio Grande valley where students will study first-hand the depth of human activity on the landscape from prehistoric Native American rock art to Spanish and Mexican Colonial era pilgrimage to modern day American recreational sites. You can get more information about the course and the field trip from Dr. Lovata (lovata@unm.edu).

Texts

This section of the triad will use academic research articles—all available for free download—from the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Cultural Geography.

Requirements

The majority of this course will be discussion and field based. Students will complete written assignments that frame the beginning and end of the course with study in the field in between. While on the weekend field trip they will complete observational assignments and fill out field notebooks that connect their seminar discussions to what they see first-hand.

About the Instructor(s): Troy Lovata

Troy R. Lovata, Ph.D. is a Professor in the University of New Mexico’s Honors College and Research Faculty in UNM’s Southwest Hispanic Research Institute. He earned degrees in Anthropology, with a concentration in Archaeology, from The University of Texas and Colorado State University. Recent Honors seminars include studies of: how people mark and visualize place; graffiti, rock art, and public art; meanings of mountains; and the archaeology of trails, walking, and Route 66—all with experiential opportunities including site visits, road trips, and hiking and backpacking field trips.