Associate Professor of Anthropology John Barthelme’s course Neandertals: Fact or Fiction? might be called the ultimate in "hands-on learning." The course is so unusual that it garnered national media exposure with a November feature story in USA Today, as well as a story in the Chicago Tribune.

What piqued the interest of reporters and editors was more than an opportunity to compare course content to popular insurance-company commercials and a poorly reviewed network situation comedy. It's that students don't just learn about our ancestors – they also get to live like them for a day, by butchering a deer with stone tools they fashion themselves. Dining services staff cook the venison, which students then eat, also using the stone tools. As Barthelme notes, "It's an experience they don't forget."

Barthelme involves students in on-going research in Kenya; he has done archaeological work for many years in East Africa and has published numerous papers on his research. Barthelme also conducts summer field courses in archeology in Kenya.

He has also traveled extensively for his personal interests. While on sabbatical in 2001, he signed on to a working camel caravan scheduled to haul salt slabs from Taoudenni, northern Mali, south across 900 kilometers of Sahara desert and the Sahel ("Sahara" is Arabic for "sand sea," "Sahel" Arabic for "sand sea shore") to Timbuktu, near the Niger River in central Mali. The journey took 21 days, during which Barthelme was able to conduct some archaeological research, learned new ways of living in relation to his environment, and, in his words, "gracefully discovered my own mortality." This is the same journey chronicled in the 2006 book Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold by Michael Benanav; Barthelme is quoted extensively in the book's Preface.