Mysterious maize What would have happened to have made people who are living a particular lifestyle for a long time, who had known about maize for a thousand years already but didn’t use it much, suddenly doubledown on this particular food source? That’s a burning question that you’ve got to answer. People don’t do that for no reason. We haven’t figured that out. Admittedly knowing nothing about archaeology or this time period, my money would be on the blight of another staple crop. It could be, but we just don’t have much evidence for that. My money is on a religious revival movement. I think that there was a movement of people and ideas that went from east to west across the Great Lakes that was connected to maize consumption, and production of a new kind of pottery vessel that symbolized something that was connected to the use of maize. That’s very vague, but it’s the closest I can come. There really doesn’t seem to be a very good environmental explanation for it at all. Is this the next great mystery in archaeology? The next great mystery is to see about farther north. There are contemporaneous populations in the same time period that live from Green Bay and north. They’ve got some interesting sites that look to be agriculture in the middle of the forest. They appear to be growing corn up in the northern forests. We haven’t got it quantified yet, but if it quantifies to about the same use of maize at about the same time period, but that far north? That, I think, will be an interesting way to think about corn and how it came to be some important to Native American populations. It really wasn’t important back, say, in AD 500, in the northeastern United States. It was not a very important food crop at all, but it suddenly became one, all over the place, at the same time. That defies our usual expectations. We like to think of things diffusing out from one place and then the idea spreads out in waves. That does not appear to be what’s going on here. By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science
8 • IN FOCUS • December, 2019
A digital dialogue: U Learning any new language can be hard, but studying Hebrew has a unique set of difficulties. It uses an entirely new alphabet, and students have to get used to reading from right to left instead of left to right. Diana Thomawong has an additional challenge: Her language teachers are more than a thousand miles away. “It works as long as you’re willing to put the time into it,” she said from her home in California. “The convenience of an online language class is nice.” Thomawong is one of a new crop of students who are taking advantage of UWM’s online language offerings. The university now offers four semesters of Hebrew online, and will offer online classes in German for the first time in the spring of 2020. Plans are in the works to begin offering French and Italian online as well. “I think these language offerings are going to be valuable, especially for less-commonly taught languages, like Hebrew, where students can’t necessarily go to their local university and find someone who’s going to be teaching Hebrew,” said Mike Darnell, “But they can ‘come’ to UWM and have that experience.” Darnell is an assistant dean of curriculum and governance in the College of Letters & Science. He’s helping bring UWM’s language courses online so that students across the country can attend UWM without ever stepping foot on campus. And now that UWM is offering these classes, Darnell added, students can more easily earn their degrees completely online as well. An online bachelor’s degree The College of Letters & Science requires students to take four semesters of a language other than English in order to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts, or two semesters of a language other than English for a Bachelor of Science. “I think you’re going to see students who already have college credit but dropped out for whatever reason coming back online for a completed degree,” Darnell said. “I think it’s going to be a huge thing for them.” For Thomawong, it means that she’ll be able to graduate this May with double majors in history and Jewish studies. “The convenience of online courses and also having a friendly user interface was what made the difference for me,” she said. The convenience can’t be overstated. Thomawong is a 35-year-old mother who manages her parents’ Thai restaurant in northern California. Between her family and
