Day 7 School Activity

Exercise 9 – Science Experiment: Increased Water Retention in Soils (Advanced School Activity )

Maize agricultural practices are theorized as being critical to the success versus failure of early human settlements in this region. Why?

Project Challenge: The stability of the early human settlements in the Utah region, in the period of ~15,000 to ~1,000 years ago was critically susceptible to variations in the climate (temperature and amounts and timing of precipitation). At the elevation that these early settlements have been unearthed, it is hypothesized that water retention in their numerous but small plots of maize was critical, and that these early humans experimented themselves with strategies to extend the period of time that water was retained by the soil. What might the successful strategies have been to reduce the rate of water loss from these soils? Can your strategy be phrased as a hypothesis? Can you then design and conduct an experiment to test the validity of your hypothesis? (Hint: Set up an experiment using several soil beds. To start, devise a method to measure water content in these soils. Next, add the same quantity of water to each of the soil beds, and then design an experiment to test your hypothesis.)