A field course manual, textbooks, handouts and other relevant reading material will be provided throughout the course. Students will be expected to read assigned chapters and topics in the manual and textbook so they can best benefit from field instructions, lectures, discussions, exercises and field journals.
General Topics + Special Field Sites
The northern Tanzania volcanic province is renowned for its tectonic activity, paleoanthropological and paleoenvironmental information it preserves. It consists of a series of extinct volcanoes (e.g., Mt. Kilimanjaro, Mt. Meru, the Ngorongoro volcanic highlands) and the famous Ol Doinyo Lengai, perhaps the only active carbonatite-rich volcano on the earth. These volcanoes range in age from the Pliocene to recent time and are responsible for the development of most paleoanthropological and archaeological sites in the region including the evolution of Serengeti grass plains. Some topics will be instructed on a particular locality depending on the nature of evidence yielded by a particular site.
