This is a discussion-oriented seminar that introduces students to the evidence, issues, and debates concerning ancient trade and exchange, with a focus on the economic institutions of the ancient Near East and especially those of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant and Eastern Mediterranean.
This course focuses on the scholarly study of the ancient Middle East, building students' familiarity with key resources, methodologies, and analytical skills at the graduate level. Classes will cover fundamental aspects of undertaking such study, including working with material objects and primary texts, site reports and plans, and old publications and archival records through case studies. This class will also include material in the museum galleries of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.
Students will produce a large annotated bibliography project aimed at either building foundational knowledge in a focused area of study or conducting further detailed study of a narrow area of interest with which they have previous experience.
This course surveys the archaeology and history of the Levant from the time of its earliest human habitation in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age around 1100 BCE.
This course provides undergraduate and graduate students with an introduction to the use of animal bones in archaeological research. Students will gain hands-on experience analyzing faunal remains from an archaeological site in the Near East. The class will address theoretical and methodological issues involved in the use of animal bones as a source of information about prehistoric societies. The course consists of lectures, laboratory sessions, and original research projects using collections of animal bone from archaeological excavations in southeast Turkey. Topics covered include: 1) identifying, ageing and sexing animal bones; 2) zooarchaeological sampling, measurement, quantification, and problems of taphonomy; 3) analysis of animal bone data; 4) reconstructing prehistoric hunting and pastoral economies, especially: animal domestication, hunting strategies, herding systems, seasonality, and pastoral production in complex societies.
Any introductory course in archaeology
Students will supervise and direct work in one or more trenches, possibly (depending on suitability and project scale) an excavation area comprised of several trenches. This includes managing the local workforce and any junior students, and developing strategies together with the project leader. They should also be the lead on one type of material culture or data collected (e.g., surface survey, ceramics, glass), managing the team responsible for recording, measuring, sampling, etc., and interpreting and synthesizing preliminary results in the field. Assessment will be based on field notes, area summary, and contribution to any preliminary reports or articles.
Since the formalization of the discipline of archaeology in the 19th century, how we make sense of the past through its material traces has undergone a number of profound transformations. This class introduces students to the diverse array of theoretical approaches archaeologists have deployed in their interpretations of ancient cultures. In the process, students will gain an appreciation for the field's close relationship to developments in neighboring fields in the humanities and social sciences. The ultimate goal is for students to realize the incredibly wide range of interpretive modes archaeologists have operated under, both historically over the past century and a half as well as in current practice.
| The treatment of the dead in past cultures provides insights into how communities engaged with religious beliefs and cosmology and how they conceptualised identity among the living. This seminar examines death, funerary practices, and beliefs in the afterlife from a cross-cultural perspective, based in the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Within each of these cultures, the rituals and format of burials and beliefs about ‘life’ after death varied widely. Most archaeological focus on burials in these cultures has been on the dead as the primary data, and many studies reflect simplistically on the economic cost of burials, rather than the effect of death on the living, the family or the socio-political structure. But there are hints in the archaeological and textual record at the response and responsibilities of those burying the dead. This seminar will use archaeological data, artworks and textual materials (in translation) to examine the diversity of responses to death in two important literate cultures. The seminars will foster engagement with theoretical approaches, varied methodologies, and two extremely rich datasets. |
Undergraduate students should have taken at least one course in the archaeology or history of Egypt or Mesopotamia
