Students looking for motivation to go green can look to the Anthropology Museum in the Burkhardt Building for motivation via its new exhibit.
Students in an anthropology class designed and built a museum exhibit about how humans have traditionally destroyed their environments. The semester-long class project is on display in the Anthropology Museum until Spring 2011.
Junior public history major Jeffrey Fout said the exhibit turned out well. The work he and the class have done has gotten praise from students, the department and the CEO of Minnetrista.
He said the exhibit, "Ecological Anthropology," is a concept devised by one of the graduate students in the class. It's the relationship between humans and their environments through time. The exhibit covers everything from before conservation agencies to deforestation, he said.
At the beginning of the semester, the Topics in Museum Operations class decided to replace the old exhibit in the museum as its class project. The old exhibit had a few smaller displays that weren't related. Fout said the class wanted to make one big exhibit.
The first few weeks were spent planning, and each student made a proposal for the new exhibit.
After choosing ecological anthropology as the theme, the class divided into three groups: research and writing; interpretation; and design and installation.
The research and writing team, which Fout was part of, looked into deforestation, slash and burn agriculture, the transcontinental railroad depleting the bison population in the Americas and the effects of dams and levies on the environment, he said.
The research team gave its materials to the interpretation and design and installation teams, which made and set up the exhibit.
The class had almost no budget. Fout said the project cost each person in the class about $14. Ball State University helped out with printing some of the material after the class provided the paper.
People can view the exhibit and various artifacts, on loan from the Ball State Applied Archaeology Laboratory, in the Anthropology Museum. It's on the third floor of the Burkhardt Building and is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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