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

A broad introduction to archaeology-the study of material remains to answer questions about the human past. Case studies highlight the variability of ancient societies and illustrate the varied methods and interpretive frameworks archaeologists use to reconstruct them. This course can serve as a platform for both archaeology and anthropology undergraduate majors.

Full details for ANTHR 1200 - Ancient Peoples and Places

Anthropology is the study of human beings. Sociocultural anthropology examines the practices, structures, and meanings that shape lived experience. But what does that mean? What do sociocultural anthropologists do, and how can their ways of knowing help us understand our interconnected world? This course introduces sociocultural anthropology—its methods, concepts, and characteristic ways of thinking. Together, we will examine how people live their lives: how we eat, work, play, and fight; how we bury our dead and care for our living; how we wield and acquiesce to power. Along the way, we will work to challenge Eurocentric models of human nature and human difference. And we will consider how anthropological tools can help address contemporary issues, from global health to climate change to racial justice.

Full details for ANTHR 1400 - Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.

Full details for ANTHR 1700 - Indigenous North America

How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, in our diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives? What structural forces shape inequalities and how do communities go about addressing social and racial injustice? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education with a focus on community engaged learning in Ithaca. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Through readings, film, and community partnerships, we will learn about global/local issues including the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, food and housing insecurity, structural violence, and migration. Students will complete projects that help them learn with and from Ithaca community members and organizations.

Full details for ANTHR 1900 - Global Engagements: Living and Working in a Diverse World

The Near East is often defined by "firsts": the first cities, writing, and complex societies. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The Middle East has also long been a place 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 in Syria and Iraq. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of 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 Middle East. Covering Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

Full details for ANTHR 2010 - Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

The history of humankind is also a history of health and disease; the rise of agricultural societies, ancient cities, and colonial empires had wide-ranging effects on diet and nutrition, the spread of infectious diseases, and occurrence of other health conditions. This history has also been shaped by complex interactions between environment, technology, and society. Using archaeological, environmental, textual, and skeletal evidence, we will survey major epidemiological transitions from the Paleolithic to the age of European conquest. We will also examine diverse cultural experiences of health, illness, and the body. How do medical practices from pre-modern societies, such as the medieval Islamic world and the Inca Empire, challenge dominant narratives of scientific development? The implications of past health patterns for modern-day communities will also be explored.

Full details for ANTHR 2245 - Health and Disease in the Ancient World

This interdisciplinary course (with an emphasis in anthropology) will introduce students to the multiple routes/roots, lived experiences, and imagined worlds of South Asians who have traveled to various lands at different historical moments spanning Fiji, South Africa, Mauritius, Britain, Malaysia, United States, Trinidad, and even within South Asia itself such as the Tamil-speaking population of Sri Lanka. The course will begin with the labor migrations of the 1830s and continue up to the present period. The primary exercise will be to compare and contrast the varied expressions of the South Asian Diaspora globally in order to critically evaluate this transnational identity. Thus, we will ask what, if any, are the ties that bind a fifth-generation Indo-Trinidadian whose ancestor came to the New World as an indentured laborer or "coolie" in the mid-19th century to labor in the cane fields, to a Pakistani medical doctor who migrated to the United States in the late 1980s. If Diaspora violates a sense of identity based on territorial integrity, then could "culture" serve as the basis for a shared identity?

Full details for ANTHR 2410 - South Asian Diaspora

One of the most pressing questions of our time is how we should understand the relationship between nature, or the environment, and culture, or society, and whether these should be viewed as separate domains at all. How one answers this question has important implications for how we go about thinking and acting in such diverse social arenas as environmental politics, development, and indigenous-state relations. This course serves as an introduction to the various ways anthropologists and other scholars have conceptualized the relationship between humans and the environment and considers the material and political consequences that flow from these conceptualizations.

Full details for ANTHR 2420 - Nature-Culture: Ethnographic Approaches to Human Environment Relations

Global Mental Health is a growing and important field within the general category of Global Public Health. Anthropology has an established and long history of contributing to the debates about cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, as well as to the perennial questions of nature versus nurture in defining normal versus pathological ways of being human. Cross-cultural explanations for varied and/or universal forms of human subjectivity, affect, and personality are increasingly relevant given new research into neurological plasticity, genomics, and the dissemination and practice of evidence-based and pharmaceutically-oriented psychiatry at the expense of more holistic and culturally nuanced forms of care. We examine the efficacy of traditional and community-based mental health practices in non-Western contexts as well as the challenges to accessibile care posed by inequality and precarity, as well as the stigmas surrounding mental illness in varied cultural contexts.

Full details for ANTHR 2424 - Culture and Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives

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

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

Representation is basic to anthropology. In the process of translating societies and cultures, anthropologists produce authoritative accounts about other people, their lives, and their communities. We will here examine, from a critical perspective, the production of representations on Latino culture[s] in anthropological texts. Issues to be explored include the relation between the ethnographer and the people s/he is studying, the contexts in which ethnographic texts are produced, the ways these texts may contribute to the position that different cultural groups have within the United States, and the implications emanating from these processes.

Full details for ANTHR 2721 - Anthropological Representations: Ethnographies on Latino Culture

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

How do music, sound, and listening practices construct race? Conversely, how might we critically understand those moments when, in experiences of music, we feel race and other divisions temporarily melt away? What would it take to unmake race for real? Would we even want to? This course seeks answers in everyday experiences like urban noise and voice-overs that racialize nonhuman movie characters, and also in texts by scholars and radical decolonial and abolitionist activists. Our goals will be, first, to build critical awareness of race's own geographic and historical embeddedness, inner logics, and sonic manifestations; and second, to consider when, how, and why race might cease to be, and what the role of sound might be in its unmaking.

Full details for ANTHR 3017 - Music in the Making and Unmaking of Race

Meaningful community-engaged archaeology has the potential to transform the discipline. Increasingly, archaeologists engage intentionally with communities, through education and outreach but also through partnerships and collaboration that entail real power sharing over archaeological research and historical preservation. These developing practices contrast with disciplinary histories that stressed extraction of information and materials and a protective stance toward cultural heritage. In this class we address such histories and have the opportunity to learn about the methods, concepts, and issues encompassed within Indigenous archaeology; archaeological research with descendant, diasporic, and "ethical" communities; participatory and applied research; and communication to broad public audiences. With greater potential relevance outside the academy, engaged archaeology can attract diverse constituents into disciplinary conversations and improve research practices.

Full details for ANTHR 3030 - Community Engagement in Archaeology

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Full details for ANTHR 3110 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

What does one do with an anthropology degree? How can studying anthropology be useful? Beyond academic careers, studying anthropology has been a part of a wide range of careers including actors and lawyers, doctors and authors, in business and heritage management and museums – and in managing everyday life. Anthropology provides tools for understanding others, ourselves, and the world in which we live. This course explores some of the ways that people have used anthropological understandings in their lives and careers, with alumni and other guest speakers talking about their experiences across a variety of professions and different stages of life.

Full details for ANTHR 3401 - Living Anthropology

This course offers a synthetic perspective on a spectrum of currently troubling phenomena -- the rise of authoritarian populism, growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes -- such as  world systems, globalization, etc. -- on the one hand, and the more intimate correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other.  Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines like political economy, history, and psychology, the course surveys and assesses both case studies of phenomena such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, and how the making and remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles.  Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, hope and fear figure crucially in people's apprehensions of the contemporary world.

Full details for ANTHR 3437 - Brave New World, 21st Century Authoritarianism

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Full details for ANTHR 3474 - Infrastructure

This course offers two things: an introduction to the global issue of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocities, and an in-depth look at two ongoing genocides in Asia: in China, and in Burma-Myanmar. First, we will study how genocide works: its prerequisites, its warning signs, and how it is carried out. We also review the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, the UN Genocide Convention and the checkered history of failing to prevent genocides, as in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc., but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new ongoing 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China, and in Burma, analyzing the background, the events, the actors involved, and the key role of media and propaganda.

Full details for ANTHR 3552 - Genocide Today

One animal behaviorist speculates that big brains develop when species are social; that is, when they must read cues from members of their group to understand when to approach, when to flee, when to fight, when to care. This course looks not only at animals in their social lives, but also at animals in their lives with us. We ask questions about how species become entangled and what that means for both parties, about the social lives of animals independently and with humans, about the survival of human and animal species, and about what it means to use animals for science, food, and profit. The course draws on readings from Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies, and animal trainers and behaviorists.

Full details for ANTHR 4101 - The Entangled Lives of Humans and Animals

This seminar examines the prehistory of power as seen in archaeological approaches to political life. We will consider the impact of political theory on archaeology and the reverberations of archaeological research upon modern regimes and revolutions. Our focus will be on a critical analysis of the central concepts orienting archaeologies of the political, including complexity, civilization, authority, sovereignty and power. Readings will draw broadly from a global set of cases in order to provide a foundation for comparison. We will engage with theory from both within archaeology and outside it in order to establish the broad inter-disciplinary parameters for investigations of the prehistory of power. And we will also consider the power of archaeology itself to shape political action in the contemporary moment.

Full details for ANTHR 4225 - The Prehistory of Power: Archaeological Visions of the Political

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

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ANTHR 4254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

An introduction to belief systems in ancient Mexico and Central America, emphasizing the blending of religion, astrology, myth, history, and prophecy. Interpreting text and image in pre-Columbian books and inscriptions is a major focus.

Full details for ANTHR 4256 - Time and History in Ancient Mexico

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification. We will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels. While we will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America. This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting. You will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones. It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 4264/ARKEO 4264) offered in the spring.

Full details for ANTHR 4263 - Zooarchaeological Method

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students a practical understanding of what anthropologists actually do in what has traditionally been understood as the field, a construction that has been contested We will examine situations that emerge in conducting fieldwork, and explore the ethical, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and practical issues that are raised in the observation, participation in, recording, and representation of sociocultural processes and practices. Students are expected to develop a semester-long, local research project that will allow them to experience fieldwork situations.

Full details for ANTHR 4403 - Ethnographic Field Methods

Living in the contemporary moment means living with reminders that the end of the world – at least as we know it – is looming. From the global ecological crisis to evangelical apocalyptic visions, and from nuclear threats to the changes wrought by automated work, people are brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and experience. In this course, we will consider how anthropologists have grappled with the end of the world, drawing the discipline's boundaries liberally. Working with ethnography, science fiction, film, and more, we will ask: What does it mean to adopt the uncertain future as an object of study? And might the end of the world as we know it also mean the start of a more speculative anthropology?

Full details for ANTHR 4416 - It's the End of the World As We Know It

This course develops an anthropological approach to corporations with a focus on large, profit-oriented, publicly-traded corporations. To denaturalize the corporation, we will consider competing cultural logics internal to corporations as well as the contingent historical processes and debates that shaped the corporate form over the past two centuries. The course will examine processes through which various social groups have sought to alter and restrain corporations as well as reciprocal corporate attempts to reshape the social environment in which they operate.

Full details for ANTHR 4419 - Anthropology of Corporations

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying—and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.

Full details for ANTHR 4448 - Death, Dying, and the Dead

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered–racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.

Full details for ANTHR 4458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis

From the Bible to the Babylonian Talmud to a graphic novel edition of the Book of Esther, texts--their composition, transmission, study and debate—have been at the core of Jewish culture for millennia, whether in diaspora or in the Land. They remain a central technology for the continuation and transformation of an identity that is rich, multiform, unique, and yet open to new influences and interactions. Approaching the varieties of textuality is one way to contemplate the broad sweep of Jewish cultural history. In this course we will consider questions of canonicity, differential access to textual authority by class and gender, the relation between alphabetical and graphic representation, and by no means least, the perenniality of Jewish humor.

Full details for ANTHR 4463 - Modes of Jewish Textuality

There is a vexed relationship between secular governance and the lived struggles of religious minorities. While proponents claim that secular reason is a solution to religious strife, recent scholarship has shown how modern secular governance has actually exacerbated religious tensions and hardened boundaries in liberal democracies. To understand this problem space, this seminar will begin with overviews of the anthropology of secularism, followed by genealogies of the religious minority form as a category of governance, and then shift to reading  ethnographies that focus on religious minorities in contemporary liberal democracies cross-culturally. Concluding with an intensive focus on South Asia, we will analyze the possibilities and limits of state forms of recognition that enumerate religion, as it intersects with other axes of difference, in the context of majority-minority relations and people's everyday identifications.

Full details for ANTHR 4485 - Secularism and the Minority Question

What does it mean to consider something a failure? What happens when a movement or campaign never quite gets off the ground, never got the traction they wanted, when a dream never comes to fruition? This class will consider the question of failure through analyzing thwarted sociopolitical, artistic, religious movements across disparate global sites and historical moments, with a particular focus on what comes after, and how failure is determined, and by whom.  Case studies will include diverted leftist campaigns, millenarian movements past and present (what happens when the end of the world never comes), artistic initiatives that came and went, and filmic and literary interpretations of failures.  For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 4493 - Utopia Lost? Failure and its Aftermaths

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

Full details for ANTHR 4620 - Jewish Cities

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

Research work supervised by the thesis advisor, concentrating on determination of the major issues to be addressed by the thesis, preparation of literature reviews, analysis of data, and the like. The thesis advisor will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4983 - Honors Thesis Research

Course will consist of several mandatory meetings of all thesis writers with the honors chair. These sessions will inform students about the standard thesis production timetable, format and content expectations, and deadlines; expose students to standard reference sources; and introduce students to each other's projects. The chair of the Honors Committee will assign the grade for this course.

Full details for ANTHR 4991 - Honors Workshop I

This course examines the history and development of anthropology as a discipline with emphasis on British social anthropology and American cultural anthropology. The course will trace major schools of thought -- Evolutionism, Functionalism, and Structuralism -- leading to the post-structural critique of culture. The latter part of the course will examine a range of  debates around anthropology's method and claims to theory beginning with the reflexive turn. Specifically, this part of the course will address how the recognition by anthropologists of the operations of power both in the world out there and within anthropology has led to diverse methodologies and theories that define contemporary anthropology.

Full details for ANTHR 6020 - History of Anthropological Thought

Meaningful community-engaged archaeology has the potential to transform the discipline. Increasingly, archaeologists engage intentionally with communities, through education and outreach but also through partnerships and collaboration that entail real power sharing over archaeological research and historical preservation. These developing practices contrast with disciplinary histories that stressed extraction of information and materials and a protective stance toward cultural heritage. In this class we address such histories and have the opportunity to learn about the methods, concepts, and issues encompassed within Indigenous archaeology; archaeological research with descendant, diasporic, and "ethical" communities; participatory and applied research; and communication to broad public audiences. With greater potential relevance outside the academy, engaged archaeology can attract diverse constituents into disciplinary conversations and improve research practices.

Full details for ANTHR 6030 - Community Engagement in Archaeology

This introductory course familiarizes students with documentary filmmaking and audiovisual modes of knowledge production. Through lectures, screenings, workshops, and labs, students will develop single-camera digital video production and editing skills. Weekly camera, sound, and editing exercises will enhance students' documentary filmmaking techniques and their reflexive engagement with sensory scholarship. Additionally, students will be introduced to nonfiction film theory from the perspective of production and learn to critically engage and comment on each other's work. Discussions of debates around visual ethnography, the politics of representation, and filmmaking ethics will help students address practical storytelling dilemmas. Over the course of the semester, students conduct pre-production research and develop visual storytelling skills as they build a portfolio of short video assignments in preparation for continued training in documentary production.

Full details for ANTHR 6110 - Documentary Production Fundamentals

This course is designed to give advanced undergraduate and graduate students a practical understanding of what anthropologists actually do in what has traditionally been understood as the field, a construction that has been contested We will examine situations that emerge in conducting fieldwork, and explore the ethical, methodological, theoretical, epistemological, and practical issues that are raised in the observation, participation in, recording, and representation of sociocultural processes and practices. Students are expected to develop a semester-long, local research project that will allow them to experience fieldwork situations.

Full details for ANTHR 6403 - Ethnographic Field Methods

This course offers a synthetic perspective on a spectrum of currently troubling phenomena -- the rise of authoritarian populism, growing inequality, racism, misogyny, nationalism, war. In particular, it links macro-scale and historical theories regarding global processes -- such as  world systems, globalization, etc. -- on the one hand, and the more intimate correlates of these macro forces shaping individual experience, on the other.  Drawing from anthropology as well as from cognate disciplines like political economy, history, and psychology, the course surveys and assesses both case studies of phenomena such as the self-delusion of the oppressed, the narcissism of dictators, and how the making and remaking of social identities relate to world economic cycles.  Course readings highlight how fantasy, imagination, hope and fear figure crucially in people's apprehensions of the contemporary world.

Full details for ANTHR 6437 - Brave New World, 21st Century Authoritarianism

In this graduate level course, we will take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class will invite students to consider the ways that "the body" (as an epistemological and ontological object) is transformed through a variety of scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested -- implicitly or explicitly -- on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students will find themselves exploring histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on "the body" and "bodiliness" aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.

Full details for ANTHR 6465 - Bodies and Bodiliness

Infrastructure! It's the hardware and software that undergirds transportation, energy, water, and security systems. This course asks what we can learn about infrastructure when we approach it not as a neutral set of technologies but as a context-dependent social and political force. Taking a critical approach to (among others) natural resources, labor, housing, and security, the course will trace how infrastructures have both served and obstructed colonial and contemporary projects for social change.

Full details for ANTHR 6474 - Infrastructure

This course offers two things: an introduction to the global issue of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other mass atrocities, and an in-depth look at two ongoing genocides in Asia: in China, and in Burma-Myanmar. First, we will study how genocide works: its prerequisites, its warning signs, and how it is carried out. We also review the creation of the term genocide as a new crime in international law after WWII, the UN Genocide Convention and the checkered history of failing to prevent genocides, as in Cambodia, Rwanda, etc., but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new ongoing 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China, and in Burma, analyzing the background, the events, the actors involved, and the key role of media and propaganda.

Full details for ANTHR 6552 - Genocide Today

This seminar examines the prehistory of power as seen in archaeological approaches to political life. We will consider the impact of political theory on archaeology and the reverberations of archaeological research upon modern regimes and revolutions. Our focus will be on a critical analysis of the central concepts orienting archaeologies of the political, including complexity, civilization, authority, sovereignty and power. Readings will draw broadly from a global set of cases in order to provide a foundation for comparison. We will engage with theory from both within archaeology and outside it in order to establish the broad inter-disciplinary parameters for investigations of the prehistory of power. And we will also consider the power of archaeology itself to shape political action in the contemporary moment.

Full details for ANTHR 7225 - The Prehistory of Power: Archaeological Visions of the Political

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

Explores the ways Mesoamericans understood the world and their place in it, and the ways they constructed history as these are reflected in the few books that have survived from the period before the European invasion. Examines the structure of writing and systems of notation, especially calendars, and considers their potential for illuminating Mesoamerican world views and approaches to history. Primary focus is detailed analysis of five precolumbian books: Codex Borgia, a central Mexican manual of divinatory ritual; Codex Boturini, a history of migration in central Mexico; Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec dynastic history; and two Maya books of astrology and divination, Codex Dresden and Codex Madrid.

Full details for ANTHR 7250 - Time and History in Ancient Mexico

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ANTHR 7254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites.  It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification.  The course will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels.  While students will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America.  This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting.  Students will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones.  It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 7264/ARKEO 7264) offered in the spring.

Full details for ANTHR 7263 - Zooarchaeological Method

Living in the contemporary moment means living with reminders that the end of the world – at least as we know it – is looming. From the global ecological crisis to evangelical apocalyptic visions, and from nuclear threats to the changes wrought by automated work, people are brushing up against the limits of human knowledge and experience. In this course, we will consider how anthropologists have grappled with the end of the world, drawing the discipline's boundaries liberally. Working with ethnography, science fiction, film, and more, we will ask: What does it mean to adopt the uncertain future as an object of study? And might the end of the world as we know it also mean the start of a more speculative anthropology?

Full details for ANTHR 7416 - It's the End of the World As We Know It

This course develops an anthropological approach to corporations with a focus on large, profit-oriented, publicly-traded corporations. To denaturalize the corporation, we will consider competing cultural logics internal to corporations as well as the contingent historical processes and debates that shaped the corporate form over the past two centuries. The course will examine processes through which various social groups have sought to alter and restrain corporations as well as reciprocal corporate attempts to reshape the social environment in which they operate.

Full details for ANTHR 7419 - Anthropology of Corporations

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying—and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.

Full details for ANTHR 7448 - Death, Dying, and the Dead

This seminar explores the educational lives and schooling experiences of women and girls through ethnographies conducted in the U.S. and different regions of the world. Drawing on the anthropology of education, and decolonial and transnational feminist theories, we explore how girls and women construct ways of knowing through prisms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, nation, and citizenship. We examine how gendered–racialized discourses of development, and state sanctioned forms of structural violence, frame their educational experiences and opportunities. In turn, we consider girls and young women as active learners and pedagogues who craft their own lives and literacies across borders and diverse spaces of home, school, and community. Lastly, we interrogate what is feminist in ethnographic representations and identify the possibilities for liberatory pedagogies.

Full details for ANTHR 7458 - Girls, Women, and Education in Global Perspective: Feminist Ethnography and Praxis

From the Bible to the Babylonian Talmud to a graphic novel edition of the Book of Esther, texts--their composition, transmission, study and debate—have been at the core of Jewish culture for millennia, whether in diaspora or in the Land. They remain a central technology for the continuation and transformation of an identity that is rich, multiform, unique, and yet open to new influences and interactions. Approaching the varieties of textuality is one way to contemplate the broad sweep of Jewish cultural history. In this course we will consider questions of canonicity, differential access to textual authority by class and gender, the relation between alphabetical and graphic representation, and by no means least, the perenniality of Jewish humor.

Full details for ANTHR 7463 - Modes of Jewish Textuality

There is a vexed relationship between secular governance and the lived struggles of religious minorities. While proponents claim that secular reason is a solution to religious strife, recent scholarship has shown how modern secular governance has actually exacerbated religious tensions and hardened boundaries in liberal democracies. To understand this problem space, this seminar will begin with overviews of the anthropology of secularism, followed by genealogies of the religious minority form as a category of governance, and then shift to reading  ethnographies that focus on religious minorities in contemporary liberal democracies cross-culturally. Concluding with an intensive focus on South Asia, we will analyze the possibilities and limits of state forms of recognition that enumerate religion, as it intersects with other axes of difference, in the context of majority-minority relations and people's everyday identifications.

Full details for ANTHR 7485 - Secularism and the Minority Question

What does it mean to consider something a failure? What happens when a movement or campaign never quite gets off the ground, never got the traction they wanted, when a dream never comes to fruition? This class will consider the question of failure through analyzing thwarted sociopolitical, artistic, religious movements across disparate global sites and historical moments, with a particular focus on what comes after, and how failure is determined, and by whom.  Case studies will include diverted leftist campaigns, millenarian movements past and present (what happens when the end of the world never comes), artistic initiatives that came and went, and filmic and literary interpretations of failures.  For longer description and instructor bio visit The Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ANTHR 7493 - Utopia Lost? Failure and its Aftermaths

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 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

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other "minority" experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.  

Full details for ANTHR 7620 - Jewish Cities

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

A broad introduction to archaeology-the study of material remains to answer questions about the human past. Case studies highlight the variability of ancient societies and illustrate the varied methods and interpretive frameworks archaeologists use to reconstruct them. This course can serve as a platform for both archaeology and anthropology undergraduate majors.

Full details for ARKEO 1200 - Ancient Peoples and Places

This introductory course surveys the archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Each week, we will explore a different archaeological discovery that transformed scholars' understanding of the ancient world. From early excavations at sites such as Pompeii and Troy, to modern field projects across the Mediterranean, we will discover the rich cultures of ancient Greece and Rome while also exploring the history, methods, and major intellectual goals of archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 1702 - Great Discoveries in Greek and Roman Archaeology

The Near East is often defined by "firsts": the first cities, writing, and complex societies. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The Middle East has also long been a place 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 in Syria and Iraq. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of 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 Middle East. Covering Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus, our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

Full details for ARKEO 2010 - Archaeology of the Ancient Near East

The history of humankind is also a history of health and disease; the rise of agricultural societies, ancient cities, and colonial empires had wide-ranging effects on diet and nutrition, the spread of infectious diseases, and occurrence of other health conditions. This history has also been shaped by complex interactions between environment, technology, and society. Using archaeological, environmental, textual, and skeletal evidence, we will survey major epidemiological transitions from the Paleolithic to the age of European conquest. We will also examine diverse cultural experiences of health, illness, and the body. How do medical practices from pre-modern societies, such as the medieval Islamic world and the Inca Empire, challenge dominant narratives of scientific development? The implications of past health patterns for modern-day communities will also be explored.

Full details for ARKEO 2245 - Health and Disease in the Ancient World

Why are the most famous ancient Greek vases found in Italy? What was the "worlds' first computer" used for? What can a brick tell us about still standing Roman buildings? What is "classical" about all this and why should we care? This course on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome will address all these questions. Covering the time span from the

Full details for ARKEO 2700 - Introduction to the Classical World in 24 Objects

With megacities, long-distance trade, and fluid identities, the Roman empire can seem uncannily close to our modern world. This course adopts a thematic approach to explore whether this is a valid parallel, based on archaeological evidence ranging from temples to farms, from wine containers to statues.

Full details for ARKEO 2711 - Archaeology of the Roman World: Italy and the West

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

Meaningful community-engaged archaeology has the potential to transform the discipline. Increasingly, archaeologists engage intentionally with communities, through education and outreach but also through partnerships and collaboration that entail real power sharing over archaeological research and historical preservation. These developing practices contrast with disciplinary histories that stressed extraction of information and materials and a protective stance toward cultural heritage. In this class we address such histories and have the opportunity to learn about the methods, concepts, and issues encompassed within Indigenous archaeology; archaeological research with descendant, diasporic, and "ethical" communities; participatory and applied research; and communication to broad public audiences. With greater potential relevance outside the academy, engaged archaeology can attract diverse constituents into disciplinary conversations and improve research practices.

Full details for ARKEO 3030 - Community Engagement in Archaeology

Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State.

Full details for ARKEO 3090 - Introduction to Dendrochronology

This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The inhabitants of the Americas produced outstanding works of art and architecture that showcased their diverse aesthetic contributions. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course will also explore the legacies of pre-Columbian art in colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America.

Full details for ARKEO 3566 - Art and Architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas

Various American Indian civilizations as well as diverse European cultures have all exerted their influences on the organization of town and city living. The course considers how each culture has altered the landscape in its own unique way as it created its own built environments.

Full details for ARKEO 3600 - Pre-Industrial Cities and Towns in North America

Students will learn method and theory on museum design and curation. The course also provides hands-on experience in designing and building exhibits for State Parks in the Finger Lakes. For the outreach component, students will work with staff from State Parks and Friends of the Parks.

Full details for ARKEO 4020 - Designing Archaeological Exhibits

This seminar examines the prehistory of power as seen in archaeological approaches to political life. We will consider the impact of political theory on archaeology and the reverberations of archaeological research upon modern regimes and revolutions. Our focus will be on a critical analysis of the central concepts orienting archaeologies of the political, including complexity, civilization, authority, sovereignty and power. Readings will draw broadly from a global set of cases in order to provide a foundation for comparison. We will engage with theory from both within archaeology and outside it in order to establish the broad inter-disciplinary parameters for investigations of the prehistory of power. And we will also consider the power of archaeology itself to shape political action in the contemporary moment.

Full details for ARKEO 4225 - The Prehistory of Power: Archaeological Visions of the Political

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

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ARKEO 4254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

An introduction to belief systems in ancient Mexico and Central America, emphasizing the blending of religion, astrology, myth, history, and prophecy. Interpreting text and image in pre-Columbian books and inscriptions is a major focus.

Full details for ARKEO 4256 - Time and History in Ancient Mexico

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites. It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification. We will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels. While we will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America. This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting. You will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones. It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 4264/ARKEO 4264) offered in the spring.

Full details for ARKEO 4263 - Zooarchaeological Method

Several major and minor kingdoms situated around the Eastern Mediterranean basin flourished during the 14th -12th centuries BCE before a widespread violent collapse occurred around 1175. Thousands of cuneiform and other documents speak to two major socioeconomic processes of the age: the creation of the first international system in world history, and the collapse of that system after about two hundred years. Our seminar uses archaeological evidence, paleoclimate studies, and textual analysis (in translation) to address several related issues. We look at how networks of information, wealth accumulation, and political power were created and what role they played in globalization and destabilization. We consider whether the key players were aware of the coming collapse, what if any counter-measures were deployed, and how some polities were more resilient than others and created even greater networks post-collapse. We analyze a variety of related sources, with close attention paid to the Amarna Letters and other Egyptian texts from the Ramesside era. Several Bronze Age and Iron Age shipwrecks are examined for their evidence of maritime connectivity. And throughout the course students will become familiar with the history, economy, cult, laws and daily life of Ugarit (Tell Ras Shamra, Syria), a cosmopolitan coastal kingdom whose unparalleled archaeological and textual record affords a particularly close view of the transformative moments of the Late Bronze Age.

Full details for ARKEO 4644 - Globalism and Collapse in the Late Bronze Age World

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

Students will learn method and theory on museum design and curation. The course also provides hands-on experience in designing and building exhibits for State Parks in the Finger Lakes. For the outreach component, students will work with staff from State Parks and Friends of the Parks.

Full details for ARKEO 6020 - Designing Archaeological Exhibits

Meaningful community-engaged archaeology has the potential to transform the discipline. Increasingly, archaeologists engage intentionally with communities, through education and outreach but also through partnerships and collaboration that entail real power sharing over archaeological research and historical preservation. These developing practices contrast with disciplinary histories that stressed extraction of information and materials and a protective stance toward cultural heritage. In this class we address such histories and have the opportunity to learn about the methods, concepts, and issues encompassed within Indigenous archaeology; archaeological research with descendant, diasporic, and "ethical" communities; participatory and applied research; and communication to broad public audiences. With greater potential relevance outside the academy, engaged archaeology can attract diverse constituents into disciplinary conversations and improve research practices.

Full details for ARKEO 6030 - Community Engagement in Archaeology

Introduction to the theory, history, and practice of Historic Preservation Planning in America, with an emphasis on understanding the development and implementation of a preservation project. The course discusses projects ranging in scale and character from individual buildings to districts to cultural landscapes; as well as topics such as preservation economics, government regulations, significance and authenticity, and the politics of identifying and conserving cultural and natural resources.

Full details for ARKEO 6620 - Perspectives on Preservation

Several major and minor kingdoms situated around the Eastern Mediterranean basin flourished during the 14th -12th centuries BCE before a widespread violent collapse occurred around 1175. Thousands of cuneiform and other documents speak to two major socioeconomic processes of the age: the creation of the first international system in world history, and the collapse of that system after about two hundred years. Our seminar uses archaeological evidence, paleoclimate studies, and textual analysis (in translation) to address several related issues. We look at how networks of information, wealth accumulation, and political power were created and what role they played in globalization and destabilization. We consider whether the key players were aware of the coming collapse, what if any counter-measures were deployed, and how some polities were more resilient than others and created even greater networks post-collapse. We analyze a variety of related sources, with close attention paid to the Amarna Letters and other Egyptian texts from the Ramesside era. Several Bronze Age and Iron Age shipwrecks are examined for their evidence of maritime connectivity. And throughout the course students will become familiar with the history, economy, cult, laws and daily life of Ugarit (Tell Ras Shamra, Syria), a cosmopolitan coastal kingdom whose unparalleled archaeological and textual record affords a particularly close view of the transformative moments of the Late Bronze Age.

Full details for ARKEO 6644 - Globalism and Collapse in the Late Bronze Age World

Various American Indian civilizations as well as diverse European cultures have all exerted their influences on the organization of town and city living. The course considers how each culture has altered the landscape in its own unique way as it created its own built environments.

Full details for ARKEO 6660 - Pre-Industrial Cities and Towns in North America

An introduction to the field of Dendrochronology and associated topics with an emphasis on their applications in the field of archaeology and related heritage-buildings fields. Course aimed at graduate level with a focus on critique of scholarship in the field and work on a project as part of the course.

Full details for ARKEO 6755 - Archaeological Dendrochronology

Archaeology studies the past through its material remains. In doing so, it builds on wide-ranging theories and methods to develop its own disciplinary toolbox. This graduate seminar explores this toolbox, treating a topic of broad theoretical and/or methodological interest such as emerging topics in archaeological thought, the history of archaeological theory, key archaeological methods, themes that tie archaeology to the wider domain of the humanities and social sciences, or some combination of the above. The seminar is taught by various members of the Archaeology faculty, each of whom offers their own version of the seminar. The seminar is required for incoming CIAMS M.A. students, and needed for CIAMS membership for Ph.D. students.

Full details for ARKEO 7000 - CIAMS Core Seminar in Archaeological Theory and Method

This seminar examines the prehistory of power as seen in archaeological approaches to political life. We will consider the impact of political theory on archaeology and the reverberations of archaeological research upon modern regimes and revolutions. Our focus will be on a critical analysis of the central concepts orienting archaeologies of the political, including complexity, civilization, authority, sovereignty and power. Readings will draw broadly from a global set of cases in order to provide a foundation for comparison. We will engage with theory from both within archaeology and outside it in order to establish the broad inter-disciplinary parameters for investigations of the prehistory of power. And we will also consider the power of archaeology itself to shape political action in the contemporary moment.

Full details for ARKEO 7225 - The Prehistory of Power: Archaeological Visions of the Political

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

Explores the ways Mesoamericans understood the world and their place in it, and the ways they constructed history as these are reflected in the few books that have survived from the period before the European invasion. Examines the structure of writing and systems of notation, especially calendars, and considers their potential for illuminating Mesoamerican world views and approaches to history. Primary focus is detailed analysis of five precolumbian books: Codex Borgia, a central Mexican manual of divinatory ritual; Codex Boturini, a history of migration in central Mexico; Codex Nuttall, a Mixtec dynastic history; and two Maya books of astrology and divination, Codex Dresden and Codex Madrid.

Full details for ARKEO 7250 - Time and History in Ancient Mexico

This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.

Full details for ARKEO 7254 - Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology

This is a hands-on laboratory course in zooarchaeological method: the study of animal bones from archaeological sites.  It is designed to provide students with a basic grounding in identification of body part and taxon, aging and sexing, pathologies, taphonomy, and human modification.  The course will deal only with mammals larger than squirrels.  While students will work on animal bones from prehistoric Europe, most of these skills are easily transferable to the fauna of other areas, especially North America.  This is an intensive course that emphasizes laboratory skills in a realistic setting.  Students will analyze an assemblage of actual archaeological bones.  It is highly recommended that students also take the course in Zooarchaeological Interpretation (ANTHR 7264/ARKEO 7264) offered in the spring.

Full details for ARKEO 7263 - Zooarchaeological Method

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

Full details for ARKEO 8901 - Master's Thesis