This sidebar to a story on First-year seminars and undergraduate research appears in the fall '09 issue of Carolina Arts & Sciences magazine.
When UNC anthropologist Brian Billman tells people that he leads a summer field school for undergraduate students in Peru, he sometimes gets the response, “Are you crazy?”
Billman founded the field school in 1998. Since then, about 170 undergraduates have become summer archaeologists, assisted by graduate students. The undergrads receive six hours of academic credit.
Students spend about a month with Billman in Peru, working five days a week excavating an ancient village (400 BC-700 AD) in the Moche River Valley, about 45 minutes from the coast. On the weekends, Billman conducts tours of local museums and archaeological sites.
“It’s definitely not for everybody,” Billman said, laughing. “It’s very dirty work, hard and tedious. But they also develop a broader understanding of the world, an appreciation for the culture and history of Peru.”
For many students, Billman said it’s an eye-opening experience.
“Some have never been out of the country; some have never been out of North Carolina before,” he said. “It’s really exciting being with the students and going through that experience with them. It’s an immersion — in the country, in archaeology —and that’s the sort of experience that changes people because they can’t just put the book back on the shelf; [the learning] is 24-7.”
Chris Jochem ’07, a geography major, participated in Billman’s field school in the summer of 2005. He was intrigued by a prehistoric site at the top of Cerro Ramon (elevation: 1,831 meters) that had not been mapped before. Jochem returned the following summer with the help of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) to conduct an archaeological survey and assessment of the site.
Jochem said he is still using the skills learned in Peru in his current job as a research associate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory west of Knoxville, Tenn.
“There’s only so much you can learn from lectures, textbooks and labs. … The next level is to try and apply some of those things,” he said. “That’s where, when faced with the challenges of doing something new, I found I learned the most.”
Kevin Kohler ’11 participated in the Peru field school the summer after his freshman year. For 10 years, Billman and his Peruvian colleague Jesús Briceño have had a unique partnership with the community of Ciudad de Dios in the Moche Valley. The researchers “hired” the community to guard the archaeological site while they were away during the year, to protect it from looters. In exchange, the archaeologists promised to take on a development project of the community’s choosing.
With the help of a Launching the Venture class through Kenan-Flagler Business School and a Kauffman Faculty Fellowship from UNC, Billman created a nonprofit, MOCHE, that supports the development projects. So far, MOCHE has built a road, a water system, a schoolhouse and a soccer field, among other projects. Their next goal? A medical clinic.
Kohler became so passionate about MOCHE that he and four other students formed an official UNC club, MOCHE-Carolina, to raise money for the nonprofit. In their first semester, they raised $600.
This past summer, Kohler returned to Peru with Billman to help with the development of a service-learning course tied to MOCHE.
Billman calls himself a “reluctant community activist and philanthropist.”
“But years later, it’s the most gratifying and rewarding experience a person can have. And when you add in the element of these young students, it’s just amazing.”
