Ancient Landscapes of South Texas: Hiding in Plain Sight скачать в хорошем качестве

Ancient Landscapes of South Texas: Hiding in Plain Sight

The Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV), an area encompassing the five southernmost counties in Texas, is often associated with poverty, narcotrafficking, and illegal border crossings. To educate residents, fuel sustainable eco-tourism, and generate positive publicity, the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS) Program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) developed “The Ancient Landscapes of South Texas” trail as a Geoheritage/regional tourism initiative. The trail highlights the rich, largely overlooked geologic and natural/cultural history of the LRGV, stretching along a 40-mile-wide corridor from the mouth of the Rio Grande as it enters the Gulf of Mexico to the city of Laredo, a distance of over 200 miles. The trail incorporates the geologic events that shaped south Texas over the last ~43 million years and 15,000 years of cultural history through human-land interaction. This documentary film explores ancient beaches and drowned shorelines, evidence of a large volcanic eruption that changed Earth’s climate, shifting sand, giant oysters and mammoths, petrified forests and thousand-year-old living trees, tiny zircon crystals, and a mighty river are part of our natural landscape. Juxtaposed with this is how this landscape has, for millennia, shaped the lives of people in the past. Today, as humanity transitions into the Anthropocene, we see how human activities, dating largely from the Industrial Revolution, change the Earth’s landscape and ecosystems along the US-Mexico borderlands. The Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS) Program at UTRGV is a consortium of anthropologists and archaeologists, biologists, historians, geologists, and geoarchaeologists who embrace a locally focused, place-based STEAM research approach to tell the story of a largely unknown region of the United States and make it accessible to K–17 educators, the public, and scholars with bilingual maps, books, exhibits, films, traveling trunks, and scholarly publications. The team that developed, produced and directed this film includes Executive Producer Juan Gonzalez, Producers Russell Skowronek, Christopher Miller, and Roseann Bacha-Garza and Director Gerardo “Bull” Sanchez. The efforts of the CHAPS Program have been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally.