Adult Programs and Tours
The Center’s Speaker Bureau offers presentations to community groups at the Center or your location. Each 45-minute lecture includes a slide show and a question and answer period. Learn about the history under your feet and the recent research conducted at the Center.
Topics include the following:
12,000 Years: The Prehistory of San Diego
People have lived in San Diego for over 12,000 years. Over 40,000 recorded archaeological sites have been discovered in San Diego County. These sites contain artifacts that provide a window to the past, including what people ate, how they hunted and how they lived. This presentation reveals what we know about the lifestyles of the ancient people who called San Diego home.
Block 112: The Untold Story of San Diego’s Working Class in the 1880s
The urban development offered a unique opportunity to examine the lives of the working class in Late Victorian San Diego. This is a group, including ethnic minorities, whose voice is hardly heard or misrepresented in the historical record. Their contribution to development of San Diego is often underappreciated. The inner-city working class survived the challenges of harsh living conditions, which lacked the infrastructure that we take for granted today. In a search for prosperity, they settled into a new life on Block 112, yet they maintained vital connections to their own heritage.
Hunting and Gathering: Shared Beginnings
For 99% of human history, we lived as hunter-gatherers. For more than two million years, all humans lived in small-scale societies, moving frequently and relying on wild food resources. It was not until about 12,000 years ago (less than 1% of human history) that plants and animals were domesticated in some parts of the world, allowing a more settled lifestyle based on farming and greater population densities. Fundamentally, our biological and cultural make-up remains rooted in this shared hunting and gathering lifestyle. This presentation explores the hunter-gatherers who lived in the San Diego Region for over 10,000 years in the context of world history.
The Science of Archaeology: How We Know What We Know
Archaeology is more than just digging stuff up. Understanding what occurred at a site requires the application of several sciences, even that math that you said you would never use. Archaeology is a branch of Anthropology, the study of human culture. Archaeology focuses on artifacts and sites to learn how people lived in the past. Archaeology reinforces the concept of a shared human heritage and provides modern people with perspectives on their own place and time in history. Archaeology has been going on in San Diego since the early 1900s. People who lived in the past weren’t “primitive” or less smart than we are today; they simply made tools using the materials and technology that were available to them at the time. This presentation discusses the scientific principles and techniques archaeologists use to learn more about ancient cultures.
For questions regarding the Center’s Adult Education Programs, or to book a presentation, please contact Executive Director Stephanie Sandoval at sjsandoval@sandiegoarchaeology.org.