Courses

This First-Year Writing Seminar is devoted to the anthropological study of the human condition. Anthropology examines all aspects of human experience, from the evolution of the species to contemporary challenges of politics, environment, and society. The discipline emphasizes empirically rich field research informed by sophisticated theoretical understandings of human social life and cultural production. The diversity of anthropology's interests provides a diverse array of stimulating opportunities to write critically about the human condition. Topics vary by semester.

Full details for ANTHR 1101 - FWS: Culture, Society, and Power

The evolution of humankind is explored through the fossil record, studies of the biological differences among current human populations, and a comparison with our closest relatives, the primates. This course investigates the roots of human biology and behavior with an evolutionary framework.

Full details for ANTHR 1300 - Human Evolution: Genes, Behavior, and the Fossil Record

This course provides a basic introduction to the Tamil language.  Our focus will be on conversational usage in common social encounters, such as in the market, visiting a family's home, the bank, a place of worship, observing a common ritual, railway station, etc. We will also learn the Tamil script and basic grammatical rules of written and spoken Tamil. Learning activities will be structured in conjunction with Tamil speaking and comprehension exercises so as to make both the learning of another culture and the learning of Tamil language part of the same process of engaged learning and research.

Full details for ANTHR 1520 - Tamil Conversation in Context

Mesopotamia is often defined by "firsts": the first villages, cities, states, and empires. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The modern countries of the region, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, have also long been places where archaeology and politics are inextricably intertwined, from Europe's 19th century appropriation of the region's heritage, to the looting and destruction of antiquities in recent wars. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of more than 10,000 years of human history, from the appearance of farming villages to the dawn of imperialism, while also engaging current debates on the contemporary stakes of archaeology in the southwest Asia. Our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

Full details for ANTHR 2010 - Archaeology of Mesopotamia

This course is an introduction to Palestine and the Palestinians. We will read ethnographic and historical studies written by scholars as well as by explorers, missionaries, revolutionaries, and spies. We will learn about Palestinian life—in Palestine, exile, and diaspora—and ask what these experiences can teach us about colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, and resistance. We will also learn about how governments, courts, and activists use historical and ethnographic texts in political and legal struggles. Readings will include academic studies as well as primary sources, films, and pamphlets, and will foreground knowledge produced by Palestinian intellectuals and organizations.

Full details for ANTHR 2104 - Palestine and the Palestinians

This course will introduce students to the meaning and significance of forms of cultural diversity for the understanding of contemporary issues. Drawing from films, videos, and selected readings, students will be confronted with different representational forms that portray cultures in various parts of the world, and they will be asked to examine critically their own prejudices as they influence the perception and evaluation of cultural differences. We shall approach cultures holistically, assuming the inseparability of economies, kinship, religion, and politics, as well as interconnections and dependencies between world areas such as Africa, Latin America, the West. Among the issues considered: political correctness and truth; nativism and ecological diversity; race, ethnicity, and sexuality; sin, religion, and war; global process and cultural integrity.

Full details for ANTHR 2400 - Cultural Diversity and Contemporary Issues

How do humans organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption? What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses a range of historical and contemporary case studies to address these questions, in the process introducing a range of analytic approaches including formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Course themes include gifts and commodities; the nature of money, markets, and finance; credit and debt relations; labor, property, and value; licit and illicit economies; capitalism and socialism; development and underdevelopment.

Full details for ANTHR 2437 - Economy, Power, and Inequality

Medicine has become the language and practice through which we address a broad range of both individual and societal complaints. Interest in this medicalization of life may be one of the reasons that medical anthropology is currently the fastest-growing subfield in anthropology. This course encourages students to examine concepts of disease, suffering, health, and well-being in their immediate experience and beyond. In the process, students will gain a working knowledge of ecological, critical, phenomenological, and applied approaches used by medical anthropologists. We will investigate what is involved in becoming a doctor, the sociality of medicines, controversies over new medical technologies, and the politics of medical knowledge. The universality of biomedicine, or hospital medicine, will not be taken for granted, but rather we will examine the plurality generated by the various political, economic, social, and ethical demands under which biomedicine has developed in different places and at different times. In addition, biomedical healing and expertise will be viewed in relation to other kinds of healing and expertise. Our readings will address medicine in North America as well as other parts of the world. In class, our discussions will return regularly to consider the broad diversity of kinds of medicine throughout the world, as well as the specific historical and local contexts of biomedicine.

Full details for ANTHR 2468 - Medicine, Culture, and Society

This collaborative online international learning and community-based global learning course invites Cornell students to explore the complexities of culture and community and their impact on development, with students and faculty from Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and community partners in Upstate New York and Quito. We will apply theories of cultural change, intercultural communication, and community empowerment to the study of development in both New York and Ecuador. We will engage in readings of theoretical texts, discussion of research on cultures of development, guest lectures from relevant community partners, and collaborative projects with USFQ student partners. Ecuadorian students will come to New York during their Spring Break for collaborative work and Cornell students will be hosted by USFQ in Ecuador during our Spring break.

Full details for ANTHR 2505 - Culture, Communities, and Development: From Upstate New York to Quito, Ecuador

This course offers an anthropological approach to the study of religious traditions and practices in South Asia: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The course begins with a short survey of the major religious traditions of South Asia: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam. We look to the development of these traditions through historical and cultural perspectives. The course then turns to the modern period, considering the impact of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization upon religious ideologies and practices. The primary focus of the course will be the ethnographic study of contemporary religious practices in the region. We examine phenomena such as ritual, pilgrimage, possession, devotionalism, monasticism, asceticism, and revivalism through a series of ethnographic case studies. In so doing, we also seek to understand the impact of politics, modernity, diasporic movement, social inequality, changing gender roles, and mass mediation upon these traditions and practices.

Full details for ANTHR 2546 - South Asian Religions in Practice: The Healing Traditions

This introductory course explores the roles of amulets, love potions, curse tablets, and many other magical practices in ancient Greek and Roman societies. In this course, you will learn how to invoke the powers of Abrasax, become successful and famous, get people to fall desperately in love with you, and cast horrible curses on your enemies! We will also examine a range of ancient and modern approaches to "magic" as a concept: what exactly do we mean by "magic," and how does it relate to other spheres of activity, like religion, science, and philosophy? When people (in ancient times or today) label the activities of others as "magic," what are the social and political consequences of that act? As we investigate the practices that Greeks and Romans considered "magical," we will also explore what those practices can teach us about many other aspects of life in the past, such as social class, gender, religion, and ethnic and cultural identity.

Full details for ANTHR 2846 - Magic and Witchcraft in the Greco-Roman World

This seminar course is designed to give anthropology majors an introduction to classical and contemporary social and anthropological theory and to help prepare them for upper-level seminars in anthropology. The seminar format emphasizes close reading and active discussion of key texts and theorists. The reading list will vary from year to year but will include consideration of influential texts and debates in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century anthropological theory especially as they have sought to offer conceptual and analytical tools for making sense of human social experience and cultural capacities.

Full details for ANTHR 3000 - Introduction to Anthropological Theory

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ANTHR 3040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk. 

Full details for ANTHR 3200 - Heritage Forensics

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Full details for ANTHR 3235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ANTHR 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

The course will investigate all aspects of non-human primate life. Based on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory, group and inter-individual behaviors will be presented. In addition, an understanding of group structure and breeding systems will be reached through an evaluation of ecological constraints imposed on primates in different habitats. Subjects include: primate taxonomy, diet and foraging, predation, cooperation and competition, social ontogeny, kinship, and mating strategies.

Full details for ANTHR 3390 - Primate Behavior and Ecology with Emphasis on African Apes

This course examines the cultures and histories of the circumpolar North. The primary emphasis is on the North American Arctic and Subarctic with some attention to northern Eurasia for comparative purposes. The focus is on the indigenous peoples of the region and the socio-political and ecological dimensions of their evolving relationships with southern industrial societies.

Full details for ANTHR 3422 - Culture, Politics, and Environment in the Circumpolar North

This course is a collaborative, intensive examination of the growing problem of extreme heat for global health and urban environmental justice. Focused on a "social autopsy" of the London heat wave of 2022, it will include a spring break visit to London, hosted at King's College London, where students will visit key sites of heat-related vulnerability and learn from architects, planners, public health experts, and community actors about the heat wave, its uneven impact, and efforts to mitigate the harm of future climate-related disasters.

Full details for ANTHR 3430 - Heat Waves and Global Health: Environmental Justice and Social Autopsy in London and Beyond

This course explores the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation. We will study the work and impact of humanists (scholars of literature, history, theory, art, visual studies, film, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies), who pose big questions about the human condition. By reading and analyzing their scholarship—critiquing them and engaging their ideas—we will craft our own methods and voices. Students will refine their research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) and design their own independent research project.

Full details for ANTHR 3950 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ANTHR 4005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ANTHR 4020 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

How have land and its inhabitants been transformed through processes of settlement? How might alternatives to settlement persist and be reactivated in ecologies profoundly shaped by capitalism and colonialism? In this course, students will work with a community partner to develop a research-based design project that explores how a specific plant or animal has been affected by processes of settler colonial capitalism. Students will conduct in-depth interviews with community partners and regularly consult with them as they work to articulate a problem and create a design concept in response. Final projects will be grounded in ethnographic research, but students will be also encouraged to brainstorm outside the realm of the possible or the practical to engage in imaginations of alternatives.

Full details for ANTHR 4183 - Disturbing Settlement - Engaged

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ANTHR 4227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ANTHR 4240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology.

Full details for ANTHR 4257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ANTHR 4264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

What are the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing? How is this genre, what many would call the signature of cultural anthropology, distinct from other modes of scholarly writing? What are its possibilities, limits and effects? In this course we will read classic and experimental ethnographies and undertake exercises in ethnographic writing as a means to investigate ethnography as epistemology, genre and craft.

Full details for ANTHR 4418 - Writing Ethnography: Theory, Genre and Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the relation between biological and the political, power and resistance, and life and death.  Fifty years ago, the philosopher Michel Foucault offered two terms to describe it: biopolitics and biopower.  In this introduction to both, we take up Foucault's writings on biopolitics in a series of interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to the philosophical, anthropological, and political.  In addition to Foucault, w will be reading elaborations on what has been called "the biopolitical paradigm" from writers as diverse as Agamben, Arendt, Arif, Biehl, Butler, Esposito, Fassin, Mbembe, and Sloterdijk.  Questions to be asked include how to describe relation between biopolitics and racism and in what ways has the pandemic altered our understanding of biopolitics.

Full details for ANTHR 4450 - Introduction to Biopolitics

This course examines theories of subjectivity and self-formation from a comparative, ethnographic perspective. We begin by examining classic and contemporary phenomenological, psychodynamic, semiotic, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories of self and subject formation. Moving into the ethnographic literature, we assess the utility of these models for understanding the selves of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and person as understood in different cultures. By examining debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, and mental health we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as the failures, of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural psychology.

Full details for ANTHR 4467 - Self and Subjectivity

Explores the interpretive and analytic tools made available through the ethnographic analysis of the societies within the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. Through anthropological understandings of culture as the primary human adaptation, we assess the possibility of understanding the lives of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and/or person as understood in different cultures. In this case, we examine relationships between culture and the environment (social and physical), focusing upon unique patterns and adaptations that have developed within particular Nilgiri societies. In doing so, we also examine debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, development, the body and health. To this end, we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions (and/or limits) of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural understanding of human nature and social processes.

Full details for ANTHR 4520 - Society and Culture in the Nilgiris: Engaged Research in Rural South India

This course offers a broad survey of contemporary Shi'i beliefs, practices, and politics with a focus on Twelver or Imami Shi'ism. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual and political histories, theological writings, and more we will investigate the themes which define the politics and cultural practices of contemporary Shi'ism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which Shi'is utilize their theological beliefs to negotiate and respond to the socio-political context of the times in which they live. The course begins by examining the early days of what would later be called "Shi'ism." We then examine the key theological concepts which distinguish Shi'ism from Sunnism, including themes of adalat (divine justice), shahadat (martyrdom), the Karbala paradigm, and the role of the imamate and clerical class. The rest of course is devoted to investigating the ways that Shi'ism informs and interacts with the social realm and vice versa, ranging from negotiations of the everyday to responding to moments of great civil and society unrest and to that which is called "sectarianism". Travelling from South Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to America, we will ultimately examine how Shi'i beliefs and identity act as a dynamic force for shaping the worlds in which they live today.

Full details for ANTHR 4637 - Shi'ism: Poetics and Politics

Therapeutic knowledge and practice in Africa have changed dynamically over the past century. Yet, questions about healing continue to be questions about the intimate ways that power works on bodies. Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class will discuss the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science and law. Our readings with trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

Full details for ANTHR 4682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 4910 - Independent Study: Undergrad I

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 4920 - Independent Study: Undergrad II

Final write-up of the thesis under the direct supervision of the thesis advisor, who will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4984 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

Course will consist of weekly, seminar-style meetings of all thesis writers until mid-semester, under the direction of the honors chair. This second semester concentrates on preparation of a full draft of the thesis by mid-semester, with ample time left for revisions prior to submission. Group meetings will concentrate on collective reviewing of the work of other students, presentation of research, and the like.

Full details for ANTHR 4992 - Honors Workshop II

This course explores advanced topics in anthropological theory and practice. It builds on the history of the discipline that students will have examined in the preceding course ANTHR 6020, and seeks to immerse students in major contemporary theoretical developments and debates and the discipline's most pressing concerns. Coursework will proceed mainly by way of reading, writing, and discussion.  

Full details for ANTHR 6025 - Proseminar in Anthropology

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ANTHR 6040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

Full details for ANTHR 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ANTHR 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

Sociologist C. Wright Mills challenged his readers to develop their "sociological imagination" to understand the social and historical forces at work in seemingly individual events, such as the receipt of a pink slip, a draft card, or a drug prescription. Within science and technology studies, scholars have documented how social issues can become scientific, technological, or medical, often appearing to leave the social realm naturalized, normalized, or pathologized. This course introduces graduate students to classic texts and concepts in social theory with a focus on how scholars apply such theories to empirical research. It will consider major thinkers and schools of social thought, such as Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Mannheim, Foucault, and the Frankfurt School. It will also consider how a nuanced interplay of theory and empirical data can bring critically important insights to both theoretical and empirical understandings of the world. The course is relevant for students in sociology, history, and anthropology who are interested in social theory.

Full details for ANTHR 6301 - Social Theory

This course examines the cultures and histories of the circumpolar North. The primary emphasis is on the North American Arctic and Subarctic with some attention to northern Eurasia for comparative purposes. The focus is on the indigenous peoples of the region and the socio-political and ecological dimensions of their evolving relationships with southern industrial societies.

Full details for ANTHR 6422 - Culture, Politics, and Environment in the Circumpolar North

Concepts and categories form the basis of much human thought and action, and anthropologists have long been fascinated by the human penchant forcategorization. Yet concepts and categories shape social scientific thought every bit as much as (if not more than) the thoughts and actions of those weproport to study. How we categorize the world and the conceptual tools we bring to bear in the study of socio-cultural phenomena profoundly shape ourunderstandings of them. Despite this, however, many of the concepts and categories that anthropologists and other social scientists use are implicit intheir work rather than consciously theorized. The goal of this course is to make students aware of the role that concepts and categories play in thepractice of social science – and anthropology in particular – and to provide them with the theoretical tools they need to adequately conceptualize theirown work and to assess conceptual frames in anthropological and other social scientific writing.

Full details for ANTHR 6430 - Concepts and Categories in Theory and Practice

This seminar focuses on preparing a full-scale proposal for anthropological fieldwork for a dissertation. Topics include identifying appropriate funding sources; defining a researchable problem; selecting and justifying a particular fieldwork site; situating the ethnographic case within appropriate theoretical contexts; selecting and justifying appropriate research methodologies; developing a feasible timetable for field research; ethical considerations and human subjects protection procedures; and preparing appropriate budgets. This is a writing seminar, and students will complete a proposal suitable for submission to a major funding agency in the social sciences.

Full details for ANTHR 6440 - Proposal Development

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ANTHR 7005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ANTHR 7020 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

How have land and its inhabitants been transformed through processes of settlement? How might alternatives to settlement persist and be reactivated in ecologies profoundly shaped by capitalism and colonialism? In this course, students will work with a community partner to develop a research-based design project that explores how a specific plant or animal has been affected by processes of settler colonial capitalism. Students will conduct in-depth interviews with community partners and regularly consult with them as they work to articulate a problem and create a design concept in response. Final projects will be grounded in ethnographic research, but students will be also encouraged to brainstorm outside the realm of the possible or the practical to engage in imaginations of alternatives.

Full details for ANTHR 7183 - Disturbing Settlement - Engaged

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ANTHR 7227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ANTHR 7240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology. This course is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates with some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, or related fields.

Full details for ANTHR 7257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ANTHR 7264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

What are the poetics and politics of ethnographic writing? How is this genre, what many would call the signature of cultural anthropology, distinct from other modes of scholarly writing? What are its possibilities, limits and effects? In this course we will read classic and experimental ethnographies and undertake exercises in ethnographic writing as a means to investigate ethnography as epistemology, genre and craft.

Full details for ANTHR 7418 - Writing Ethnography: Theory, Genre and Practice

The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the relation between biological and the political, power and resistance, and life and death.  Fifty years ago, the philosopher Michel Foucault offered two terms to describe it: biopolitics and biopower.  In this introduction to both, we take up Foucault's writings on biopolitics in a series of interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to the philosophical, anthropological, and political.  In addition to Foucault, w will be reading elaborations on what has been called "the biopolitical paradigm" from writers as diverse as Agamben, Arendt, Arif, Biehl, Butler, Esposito, Fassin, Mbembe, and Sloterdijk.  Questions to be asked include how to describe relation between biopolitics and racism and in what ways has the pandemic altered our understanding of biopolitics.

Full details for ANTHR 7450 - Introduction to Biopolitics

This course examines theories of subjectivity and self-formation from a comparative, ethnographic perspective. We begin by examining classic and contemporary phenomenological, psychodynamic, semiotic, structuralist, and post-structuralist theories of self and subject formation. Moving into the ethnographic literature, we assess the utility of these models for understanding the selves of others, particularly in critical juxtaposition to multiple and alternate theories of the self and person as understood in different cultures. By examining debates in the anthropology of emotion, cognition, healing, and mental health we bring into sharper focus the particular theoretical and empirical contributions, as well as the failures, of anthropologists towards developing a cross-cultural psychology.

Full details for ANTHR 7467 - Self and Subjectivity

Independent reading course on topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7520 - Southeast Asia: Readings in Special Problems

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7530 - South Asia: Readings in Special Problems

Independent reading course on topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7540 - Problems in Himalayan Studies

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7550 - East Asia: Readings in Special Problems

This course offers a broad survey of contemporary Shi'i beliefs, practices, and politics with a focus on Twelver or Imami Shi'ism. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual and political histories, theological writings, and more we will investigate the themes which define the politics and cultural practices of contemporary Shi'ism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which Shi'is utilize their theological beliefs to negotiate and respond to the socio-political context of the times in which they live. The course begins by examining the early days of what would later be called "Shi'ism." We then examine the key theological concepts which distinguish Shi'ism from Sunnism, including themes of adalat (divine justice), shahadat (martyrdom), the Karbala paradigm, and the role of the imamate and clerical class. The rest of course is devoted to investigating the ways that Shi'ism informs and interacts with the social realm and vice versa, ranging from negotiations of the everyday to responding to moments of great civil and society unrest and to that which is called "sectarianism". Travelling from South Asia to the Middle East, from Africa to America, we will ultimately examine how Shi'i beliefs and identity act as a dynamic force for shaping the worlds in which they live today.

Full details for ANTHR 7637 - Shi'ism: Poetics and Politics

Healing and medicine are simultaneously individual and political, biological and cultural. In this class, we will study the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the relationship between medicine, science and law. We will explore the questions African therapeutics poses about the intimate ways that power works on and through bodies. Our readings will frame current debates around colonial and postcolonial forms of governance through medicine, the contradictions of humanitarianism and the health crisis in Africa, and the rise of new forms of therapeutic citizenship. We will examine the ways in which Africa is central to the biopolitics of the contemporary global order.

Full details for ANTHR 7682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

A series of workshops and lectures on a range of themes in the discipline sponsored by the Department of Anthropology. Presentations include lectures by invited speakers, debates featuring prominent anthropologists from across the globe, and works in progress presented by anthropology faculty and graduate students.

Full details for ANTHR 7900 - Department of Anthropology Colloquium

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7910 - Independent Study: Grad I

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7920 - Independent Study: Grad II

Independent reading course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ANTHR 7930 - Independent Study: Grad III

Mesopotamia is often defined by "firsts": the first villages, cities, states, and empires. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The modern countries of the region, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, have also long been places where archaeology and politics are inextricably intertwined, from Europe's 19th century appropriation of the region's heritage, to the looting and destruction of antiquities in recent wars. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of more than 10,000 years of human history, from the appearance of farming villages to the dawn of imperialism, while also engaging current debates on the contemporary stakes of archaeology in the southwest Asia. Our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

Full details for ARKEO 2010 - Archaeology of Mesopotamia

An introduction to the origins and development of Western medicine in ancient Greece and Rome. We will read a variety of sources on the ancient theory and practice of medicine, including pre-Hippocratic works, the Hippocratic corpus, and the prolific and opinionated Galen. These texts will be complemented by secondary sources which will put them in scientific and social context, as well as by visual and material evidence. Questions to be considered will include the treatment of women, the relationship between medicine and magic, the evolving state of the arts of anatomy and physiology, and rival schools of thought about the right way to acquire medical knowledge.

Full details for ARKEO 2640 - Introduction to Ancient Medicine

This introductory course explores the roles of amulets, love potions, curse tablets, and many other magical practices in ancient Greek and Roman societies. In this course, you will learn how to invoke the powers of Abrasax, become successful and famous, get people to fall desperately in love with you, and cast horrible curses on your enemies! We will also examine a range of ancient and modern approaches to "magic" as a concept: what exactly do we mean by "magic," and how does it relate to other spheres of activity, like religion, science, and philosophy? When people (in ancient times or today) label the activities of others as "magic," what are the social and political consequences of that act? As we investigate the practices that Greeks and Romans considered "magical," we will also explore what those practices can teach us about many other aspects of life in the past, such as social class, gender, religion, and ethnic and cultural identity.

Full details for ARKEO 2846 - Magic and Witchcraft in the Greco-Roman World

Undergraduate students pursue topics of particular interest under the guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 3000 - Undergraduate Independent Study in Archaeology and Related Fields

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ARKEO 3040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk. 

Full details for ARKEO 3200 - Heritage Forensics

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Full details for ARKEO 3235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ARKEO 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ARKEO 4005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 4025 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for "decolonizing" museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.

Full details for ARKEO 4035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art

This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.

Full details for ARKEO 4166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ARKEO 4227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ARKEO 4240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 4257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 4264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

Early states emerged when select groups gained control over wealth and power and institutionalized that control. How this was accomplished is a question of political economy that we can approach from archaeological, anthropological, and sociological perspectives. The course introduces students to the intellectual development of historical materialism in Smith, Marx, and Weber, among others, and traces their influence on later socioeconomic historians such as Polanyi and Finley. More recent approaches deriving from world-systems, gender studies, post-colonial studies, game theory, and network theory are then applied to case studies that include the emergence of a Mesopotamian state ca. 3400 BC, the Akkadian and Ur III empires, Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian trade, pharaonic Egypt, the international Late Bronze Age world, Aegean palatial civilization, and the Phoenicians. Students are welcome to present and write on other topics also. Monroe will provide context and clarification to assist with the specialist literature, but prior coursework in ancient studies will be advantageous in critically evaluating and writing about all the course readings.

Full details for ARKEO 4670 - Wealth and Power: Political Economy in Ancient Near Eastern States

Independent work under the close guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 4981 - Honors Thesis Research

The student, under faculty direction, will prepare a senior thesis.

Full details for ARKEO 4982 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

Graduate students pursue advanced topics of particular interest under the guidance of faculty member(s).

Full details for ARKEO 6000 - Graduate Independent Study in Archaeology

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ARKEO 6040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

This course engages students in Archaeology and related fields in a semester-long discussion of the craft of archaeology with the faculty of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. Each week, a different faculty member will moderate a conversation on the professional skills vital to the modern practice of archaeological research and the tools key to professionalization. Seminar topics include developing a research project and working with museum collections to matters of pedagogy and career development.

Full details for ARKEO 6100 - The Craft of Archaeology

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

Full details for ARKEO 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ARKEO 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ARKEO 7005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 7025 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for "decolonizing" museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.

Full details for ARKEO 7035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art

This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.

Full details for ARKEO 7166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ARKEO 7227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ARKEO 7240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology. This course is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates with some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, or related fields.

Full details for ARKEO 7257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 7264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

Students, working individually with faculty member(s), prepare a master's thesis in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 8902 - Master's Thesis