Courses

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

This introductory course surveys archaeology's contributions to the study of American Indian cultural diversity and change in North America north of Mexico. Lectures and readings will examine topics ranging from the debate over when the continent was first inhabited to present-day conflicts between Native Americans and archaeologists over excavation and the interpretation of the past. We will review important archaeological sites such as Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Lamoka Lake, and the Little Bighorn battlefield. A principal focus will be on major transformations in lifeways such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of political-economic hierarchies, and the disruptions that accompanied the arrival of Europeans to the continent.

Full details for ANTHR 2235 - Archaeology of Indigenous North America

This course will examine the natural history of wild chimpanzees with an eye toward better understanding the changes that would have been necessary in human evolutionary history to promote the emergence of human culture and political life. After an overview of early research and preliminary attempts to apply our knowledge of chimpanzee life to social and political theory, the class will focus on our now extensive knowledge of chimpanzees derived from many ongoing, long-term field studies. Topics of particular interest include socialization, alliance formation and cooperation, aggression within and between the sexes, reconciliation, the maintenance of traditions, tool use, nutritional ecology and social organization, territorial behavior, and the importance of kin networks. The question of whether apes should have rights will also be explored.

Full details for ANTHR 2310 - The Natural History of Chimpanzees and the Origins of Politics

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 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

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

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

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Full details for ANTHR 3230 - Humans and Animals

Topic Fall 2023: Learning from Movements: Refuge, Asylum, & Activism. Learning from Movements highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.

Full details for ANTHR 3402 - Social Justice: Special Topics

Full details for ANTHR 3411 - Jewish Family and Marriage Law

The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified.   

Full details for ANTHR 3416 - The Barbarians

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

Kingship plays an outsize role in Asian countries today, in both democratic and authoritarian countries. Even in countries that abolished the monarchy, the legacy of kingship is very much at play. In this course we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, with attention to both tradition and present-day modern states. Focusing on kingship as both ideology and practice, we will study how states and monarchic traditions first came to be, including as Stranger-Kings, Buddhist monarchs, secondary state formation, local adaptations of foreign models, and more. We will examine examples such as China, from the ancient states and early empires to the legacy of empire there today; Cambodia and its Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions; as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Using readings, films, lectures and guest presentations, we will re-examine the role of kingship in Asia so as to enable a new understanding of both ancient, historical, and contemporary Asia.

Full details for ANTHR 3520 - Kingship and Statecraft in Asia: Angkor and Beyond

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective?  Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

Full details for ANTHR 3680 - Islam and the Ethnographic Imagination

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Full details for ANTHR 4200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ANTHR 4246 - Human Osteology

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 seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for ANTHR 4272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.

Full details for ANTHR 4402 - Anthropology of Education

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

Identifying and managing the toxic is critical to medical and environmental sciences as well as techniques of governing and resisting. This course takes up the subject of toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge and ethical substance. We will consider the specific histories of industrialization and of the sciences that shape modern engagements with toxicity, and we will explore other ways that the sorts of harms, poisons, and powers glossed as toxicity have been articulated. Over the course of the semester, students will develop the skills to provincalizing relations between toxicity, remedy and memory. Texts will draw from social theory, anthropology, science and technology studies and history as well as art and activism.

Full details for ANTHR 4442 - Toxicity

Full details for ANTHR 4466 - Citizenship, Borders, and Belonging

Full details for ANTHR 4610 - Environmental Justice and the Middle East

American Jews have frequently been touted as a "model minority." This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions between Jewish immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility—all through the prism of New York's Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere between the mid-19th century and the 1920s.  We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants/migrants by considering social institutions as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine interactions with the built environment —most especially the tenement—in Lower East Side culture. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, splits, and gender in the garment trade. From the perspective of the present, the course will examine how commemoration, heritage tourism and the selling of [immigrant] history intersect with gentrifying real estate in an "iconic" New York City neighborhood. Projects using the ILR's archives on the Triangle Fire and other topics are explicitly encouraged. This course counts as an out of college elective for B. Arch and M. Arch students.

Full details for ANTHR 4733 - The Lower East Side: Jews and the Immigrant City

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of "more than human relations." Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits.

Full details for ANTHR 4774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality

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

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

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Full details for ANTHR 6230 - Humans and Animals

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

Full details for ANTHR 6411 - Jewish Family and Marriage Law

The idea of the barbarians is as old as civilization itself. But what is a barbarian, and what is the role that barbarians play, as the savage enemies of civilization? In this course we will address such questions by looking at how different civilizations have imagined their barbarians, ranging from their key role in Greek drama, and as infidels in religious conceptions, to Chinese walls, and American savagery. We will examine both historical examples, and the barbarians of today -- the terrorists and insurgents so often framed as dark and primitive, in contrast with ourselves. Through readings and visual materials, we will seek to discover what these barbarians have in common. We will look comparatively for the underlying patterns of history that the barbarians are drafted from, to draw a new picture of the barbarians. At the same time, we will arrive at a new understanding of civilization as such, as well as of the general nature of human inequality, and how it is justified.   

Full details for ANTHR 6416 - The Barbarians

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

Full details for ANTHR 6520 - Kingship and Statecraft in Asia: Angkor and Beyond

How does one study Islam from an anthropological perspective? Through close readings of recent ethnographies, canonical texts, theoretical works, and critiques of the genre, we will understand the major debates and intellectual trends that have defined the anthropology of Islam from its earliest inception through the present day. Geographic areas covered include South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, America, North Africa, and West Africa.

Full details for ANTHR 6680 - Islam and the Ethnographic Imagination

Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories—like diaspora—that surpass or circumvent them. The second addresses how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection.

Full details for ANTHR 7139 - Global Currents: Immobility and Multi-Sited Ethnography

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Full details for ANTHR 7200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ANTHR 7246 - Human Osteology

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 uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for ANTHR 7272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

This seminar examines public schools and other educational spaces as sites where knowledge, learning, learner, and identities are produced and contested. It explores how power and cultural norms work in educational settings, and the unintended teaching and learning that happens outside the purported curriculum. Topics include issues of multiculturalism and pluralism in schools and society, the school achievement of racial and ethnic minorities, youth cultures and identities, and literacy in adult learning spaces. This course is for students interested in the advanced study of multicultural schooling and education.

Full details for ANTHR 7402 - Anthropology of Education

Identifying and managing the toxic is critical to medical and environmental sciences as well as techniques of governing and resisting. This course takes up the subject of toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge and ethical substance. We will consider the specific histories of industrialization and of the sciences that shape modern engagements with toxicity, and we will explore other ways that the sorts of harms, poisons, and powers glossed as toxicity have been articulated. Over the course of the semester, students will develop the skills to provincalizing relations between toxicity, remedy and memory. Texts will draw from social theory, anthropology, science and technology studies and history as well as art and activism. 

Full details for ANTHR 7442 - Toxicity

Full details for ANTHR 7466 - Citizenship, Borders, and Belonging

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

The materiality of art as willful agents will be considered from ontology to an Indigenous expression of "more than human relations." Located at the intersection of multiple modernities, art and science; the shift from art historical framings of form over matter and connoisseurship to viewing materiality as an active process that continues to map larger social processes and transformation will be discussed. Archives will be sites of investigation across varied Indigenous geographies marking place, space, bodies and land. This class is designed to introduce the latest methodologies in the field of art history, material culture and Indigenous Studies. Students will consult the archive, do hands-on evaluation of art, material culture, and expand their historic and theoretical knowledge about materiality. Beyond the theoretically and historically grounded critique this class provides, it will also introduce students to working with original documents and / or conduct on-site research. Students will consult the Cornell University library holdings of the Huntington Free Library's Native American Collection and conduct original archival research with historic and contemporary art and material culture at Haudenosaunee cultural centers, museums and exhibitions spaces through a class trip or individual visits.

Full details for ANTHR 7774 - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality

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 world. 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

This introductory course surveys archaeology's contributions to the study of American Indian cultural diversity and change in North America north of Mexico. Lectures and readings will examine topics ranging from the debate over when the continent was first inhabited to present-day conflicts between Native Americans and archaeologists over excavation and the interpretation of the past. We will review important archaeological sites such as Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Lamoka Lake, and the Little Bighorn battlefield. A principal focus will be on major transformations in lifeways such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of political-economic hierarchies, and the disruptions that accompanied the arrival of Europeans to the continent.

Full details for ARKEO 2235 - Archaeology of Indigenous North America

This course examines the production and exchange of wine, beer, coffee and tea, and the social and ideological dynamics involved in their consumption. We start in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and end with tea and coffee in the Arab and Ottoman worlds. Archaeological and textual evidence will be used throughout to show the centrality of drinking in daily, ritual and political life.

Full details for ARKEO 2522 - Drinking through the Ages: Intoxicating Beverages in Near Eastern and World History

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

This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.

Full details for ARKEO 3010 - The Archaeology of the City of Rome

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 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

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 3230 - Humans and Animals

Kingship plays an outsize role in Asian countries today, in both democratic and authoritarian countries. Even in countries that abolished the monarchy, the legacy of kingship is very much at play. In this course we will study Asia's kingdoms, states, and empires, with attention to both tradition and present-day modern states. Focusing on kingship as both ideology and practice, we will study how states and monarchic traditions first came to be, including as Stranger-Kings, Buddhist monarchs, secondary state formation, local adaptations of foreign models, and more. We will examine examples such as China, from the ancient states and early empires to the legacy of empire there today; Cambodia and its Angkor empire modeled on Indian traditions; as well as Burma, Thailand, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Using readings, films, lectures and guest presentations, we will re-examine the role of kingship in Asia so as to enable a new understanding of both ancient, historical, and contemporary Asia.

Full details for ARKEO 3520 - Kingship and Statecraft in Asia: Angkor and Beyond

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Full details for ARKEO 4200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARKEO 4233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ARKEO 4246 - Human Osteology

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 seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for ARKEO 4272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

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

This course tells the history of the Roman empire through the urban development of its capital from the early 1st millennium BCE to the advent of Christian emperors in the 4th century CE. What does the archeology reveal about how the geography and environment of this site, its society and political systems, military conquests, economy, infrastructure, resources, and technologies interacted to create the center of an empire? Special focus is on how the appropriation of other peoples and cultures shaped the metropolis itself. Did it manage to integrate individuals from Africa, the Near East, from North of the Alps and Britain, and if so, how? The history of excavations and the reception of the city's architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries will provide a critical lens for analyzing some of the master narratives associated with ancient Rome and its ruins.

Full details for ARKEO 6110 - The Archeology of the City of Rome

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 6230 - Humans and Animals

Topics Rotate. Spring 23 topic: Humans and Animals. As Greek and Roman societies relied fundamentally on hunting and agriculture, animals constituted a crucial point of reference in their conception of the world. Animals occupied different functions and roles for humans, such as foe or protector and companion, food and resource, sacrificial victim, subject and object of prodigies, but also status symbol, pet, object of entertainment, object of scientific study etc. We will look at how the different forms of interaction between humans and animals resulted from man's views of other species, but also how such interactions themselves helped shape these views. How did they eventually intersect with discourses on gender, age, class, and race? We will investigate written sources covering the whole range of literary genres; images; and archaeological material. Readings will also refer to the modern debate on the relationship between humans and animals.

Full details for ARKEO 6233 - Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Full details for ARKEO 6530 - Kingship and Statecraft in Asia: Angkor and Beyond

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

Full details for ARKEO 6701 - Advanced Readings in Archaeology

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

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Full details for ARKEO 7200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

This is an intensive laboratory course in the study of human skeletal remains. A detailed knowledge of skeletal anatomy is fundamental to forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, and the medical sciences. This course teaches students how to identify all 206 bones and 32 teeth of the human skeleton, in both complete and fragmentary states. Students will also learn osteological methods for establishing a biological profile and documenting skeletal trauma and pathological lesions. Hands-on laboratory training will be supplemented by case studies that demonstrate the importance of human osteology for criminal investigations in the present and the study of health and violence in the past. The ethics of working with human remains are also discussed.

Full details for ARKEO 7246 - Human Osteology

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 uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for ARKEO 7272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

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

Full details for ARKEO 8901 - Master's Thesis