Courses

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

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

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 1520 - Tamil Conversation in Context

This course explores what has been termed "the modern plague."  It investigates the social history, cultural politics, biological processes, and global impacts of the retrovirus, HIV, and the disease syndrome, AIDS. It engages material from multiple fields: life sciences, social sciences, & humanities as well as media reports, government documents, activist art, and community-based documentaries. It explores various meanings and life-experiences of HIV & AIDS; examines conflicting understandings of health, disease, the body; investigates political struggles over scientific research, biomedical & public health interventions, and cultural representations; and queries how HIV vulnerability is shaped by systems of power and inequality. As well, we come to learn about the practices, the politics, and the ethics of life and care that arise in "the age of epidemic."

Full details for ANTHR 2021 - Viruses- Humans-Viral Politics (Social History and Cultural Politics of HIV & AIDS)

Throughout most of the human career, people survived by hunting and gathering wild foods. The advent of food production is one of the most profound changes in (pre)history. This course examines the current evidence for the appearance and spread of agriculture (plant and animal domestication) around the world. We will consider definitions of agriculture and domestication, the conditions under which it arises, the consequences for those who adopt it, and why it has spread over most of the world.

Full details for ANTHR 2201 - Early Agriculture

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

Full details for ANTHR 2400 - Cultural Diversity and Contemporary Issues

"Heritage" typically conjures images of a glorified human past, and evokes sentiments of care for lost or endangered cultures that symbolize humanity's diversity. But heritage is also the foundation for a multi-billion dollar tourist industry and a basis for claims to national sovereignty. A closer look at heritage reveals institutions, places, and things possessed of extraordinary power. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this course attends to the complexities of heritage today. Topics include heritage ethics, tourism and the marketing of the past, approaches to preservation and management, disputed heritage and violence, heritage ideologies from nationalism to universalism, participation and inequality from the grassroots to the global, "counterheritage", and the practice of public archaeology. Students apply insights gained by designing projects as heritage practitioners, engaged with "heritage-scapes" at Cornell and beyond.

Full details for ANTHR 2465 - Global Heritage

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

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

Examines the theories and mechanisms of modern evolutionary biology as they apply to present-day humans and their hominid ancestors. Lectures and discussions of molecular and paleontological evidence of human evolution, the causes and consequences of contemporary human biological diversity, and biological and behavioral modes of human adaptation to past and present natural and cultural environments.

Full details for ANTHR 2750 - Human Biology and Evolution

Computers are powerful tools for working, playing, thinking, and living. Laptops, PDAs, webcams, cell phones, and iPods are not just devices, they also provide narratives, metaphors, and ways of seeing the world. This course critically examines how computing technology and society shape each other and how this plays out in our everyday lives. Identifies how computers, networks, and information technologies reproduce, reinforce, and rework existing cultural trends, norms, and values. Looks at the values embodied in the cultures of computing and considers alternative ways to imagine, build, and work with information technologies.

Full details for ANTHR 3061 - Computing Cultures

This is an interdisciplinary course on water and disasters. It confronts the question about which environmental phenomena (restricted to watery ones) we consider disasters (whether fast-onset or slow-onset), how are they represented, and what is missing in such representation. We will build on theory in the social sciences (anthropology, development sociology), humanities (history in particular) and natural sciences of water (geology/hydrogeology, fluvial morphology, geochemistry of water, water management), but ground our discussion in case studies of floods, mudslides, water toxicity, and water scarcity/insecurity. The course will comprise of interactive lectures and experiential learning, including building an art/research installation "The Flood Room: Environmental Knowledge, Disaster Preparedness, Community Resilience and Climate Change Communication in Ithaca, New York."

Full details for ANTHR 3136 - Floods, Toxic Drinking Water and Other Muddy Disasters

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

Full details for ANTHR 3235 - Bioarchaeology

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish "discovery" not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record.  Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence.  The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

Full details for ANTHR 3245 - Across the Seas: Contacts between the Americas and the Old World Before Columbus

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas.  The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion.  We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion.  Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authors.  We then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization.  We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

Full details for ANTHR 3255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

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

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

Examines how systems of thought, symbolic forms, and ritual practice are formulated and expressed in primarily non-Western societies. Focuses on anthropological interpretations of space, time, cosmology, myth, classificatory systems (e.g., color, totems, food, dress, kinship), taboos, sacrifice, witchcraft, sorcery, and rites of passage (birth, initiation, marriage, death). Examines both the roles of specialists (e.g., spirit mediums, curers, priests, ascetics) and nonspecialists in producing these cultural forms.

Full details for ANTHR 3420 - Myth, Ritual, and Symbol

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 (e.g., "world systems," "globalization"), 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 (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

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 (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China and in Burma, respectively, analyzing the background, the events, the actors involved, and the key role of media and propaganda.

Full details for ANTHR 3552 - Genocide Today

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 3950 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

This seminar course will explore the management structures that define, protect, and defend cultural heritage. The course will train students to conduct ethnographic investigations of heritage institutions in a transnational context. The course will examine the history of global, national, and local cultural heritage. Students in this class will gain a nuanced understanding of how and why heritage is managed, monitored, and preserved by transnational institutions, including UNESCO, national and municipal governments, and local communities. This course is intended to prepare students to work within the heritage industry, both as participants and as critical observers. Students will learn methodologies central to the analysis of cultural heritage as well as how to navigate a wide range of issues concerned with heritage management and preservation.

Full details for ANTHR 4056 - Heritage Management: Understanding Techniques and Practices

How do humans live with the ruins we create? What lifeways and lifeforms do ruins sustain? What forces cause the remnants of late modernity to endure or erode? Through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar interrogates ruination as a condition of the human experience—one that has intensified in the afterlife of modernity, and one whose study might help us cope with advancing planetary decline, even as we work to curb it. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ANTHR 4143 - Life in Ruins

This seminar explores the sociocultural dimensions of various flows of energy as these have shaped contemporary Indigenous experience. From nuclear power to fossil fuels, and from ethnobotanicals to gaming enterprises, energy is a sociotechnical force impacting Native American landscapes, bodies, and communities. A critical understanding of settler colonialism today requires an understanding of these material-semiotic flows of energy as they profoundly constitute places and politics, for many Native Nations. Using ethnographic and historical texts, as well as fiction, visual artwork, and poetry, we will consider how energy is never solely a technical or scientific process, but is fundamentally a social practice, always embedded in complex, uneven relations of power. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ANTHR 4145 - Indigeneity and Energy in Native America

A martial artist learns movements and quirks unique to his teacher. A dancer conveys unbearable sorrow with a curve of her back. An artist's charcoal flies across the page. Horse and rider make a pirouette in perfect balance. This course emerges from the idea that we know our worlds through movement. Using texts drawn from anthropology, philosophy, sensory studies, science studies, and animal studies, this course pushes against any simple division of mind and body by examining balance, kinesthesia, and proprioception as often-neglected means of knowing our worlds. It also critiques the static and fixed nature of "rational-centric" thinking, considering how the movement energy of living beings challenges and disrupts division, separation and stabilization. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ANTHR 4146 - Moving and Knowing

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

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

This course provides a hands-on introduction to analytical methods in archaeology, focusing on the circa 1688-1715 Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca) White Springs site, located near Geneva, New York. White Springs was a densely-occupied Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) town of about 8 acres that held as many as 100 longhouses and was home to 1700-2000 people; its residents interacted with European colonists and many other indigenous groups. Students will generate new archaeological interpretations by analyzing artifact assemblages recovered by Cornell excavations undertaken in 2007-2015. Readings provide essential background on the history and material culture of the White Springs era. Students will prepare 15-page analytical papers which can draw on field data, museum collections, historical texts, or a combination of these sources.

Full details for ANTHR 4260 - Analyzing the Archaeological Record: The White Springs Site

Çatalhöyük, a famous Neolithic site in Turkey, is known for its large size, its spectacular wall paintings and other art, and its highly structured houses.  It is also a nexus of many key issues in current archaeology: the roles of science and the humanities in archaeological theory and practice, public archaeology, and the intersection of politics and archaeology, for example.  It is a key site for the understanding of animal domestication, Neolithic religion, gender relations in the prehistoric Near East, and the effects of aggregated settlement.  In this course, we will use the site as a lens to examine these and other issues in archaeological practice in general and the Neolithic of the Near East in particular.

Full details for ANTHR 4262 - Catalhoyuk and Archaeological Practice

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 production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

Full details for ANTHR 4401 - Advanced Documentary Production

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death  is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Full details for ANTHR 4413 - Walter Benjamin

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 4520 - Society and Culture in the Nilgiris: Engaged Research in Rural South India

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 4925 - Nilgiris Independent Study

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

Full details for ANTHR 4984 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

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

Full details for ANTHR 4992 - Honors Workshop II

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

Full details for ANTHR 6025 - Proseminar in Anthropology

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

Full details for ANTHR 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish "discovery" not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record.  Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence.  The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

Full details for ANTHR 6245 - Across the Seas: Contacts between the Americas and the Old World Before Columbus

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas.  The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion.  We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion.  Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authors.  We then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization.  We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

Full details for ANTHR 6255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

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 (e.g., "world systems," "globalization"), 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 (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

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

Full details for ANTHR 6440 - Proposal Development

This course offers 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 (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.), but also some successes. Then, we focus on the new 21st century genocides under way in Xinjiang, China and in Burma, respectively, analyzing the background, the events, the actors involved, and the key role of media and propaganda.

Full details for ANTHR 6552 - Genocide Today

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

This course offers an introduction to theoretical and practical aspects of the interdisciplinary field of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, providing graduate students with a range of disciplinary approaches and issues. We will explore both the disciplinary specifics of FGSS scholarship and the interdisciplinary breadth of gender/sexuality's reach as an analytic lens. While many of our graduate courses train students in highly specialized areas of feminist theory, this course aims to teach students how to find common intellectual ground from interdisciplinary perspectives without sacrificing the complexity of any disciplinary approach. The course is designed for graduate minors in FGSS and students with a specialized interest in feminist theory. Although it is not required, the course is strongly recommended for students obtaining a graduate minor in FGSS.

Full details for ANTHR 6880 - Proseminar in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

This seminar course will explore the management structures that define, protect, and defend cultural heritage. The course will train students to conduct ethnographic investigations of heritage institutions in a transnational context. The course will examine the history of global, national, and local cultural heritage. Students in this class will gain a nuanced understanding of how and why heritage is managed, monitored, and preserved by transnational institutions, including UNESCO, national and municipal governments, and local communities. This course is intended to prepare students to work within the heritage industry, both as participants and as critical observers. Students will learn methodologies central to the analysis of cultural heritage as well as how to navigate a wide range of issues concerned with heritage management and preservation.

Full details for ANTHR 7056 - Heritage Management: Understanding Techniques and Practices

How do humans live with the ruins we create? What lifeways and lifeforms do ruins sustain? What forces cause the remnants of late modernity to endure or erode? Through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar interrogates ruination as a condition of the human experience—one that has intensified in the afterlife of modernity, and one whose study might help us cope with advancing planetary decline, even as we work to curb it. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.

Full details for ANTHR 7143 - Life in Ruins

This seminar explores the sociocultural dimensions of various flows of energy as these have shaped contemporary Indigenous experience. From nuclear power to fossil fuels, and from ethnobotanicals to gaming enterprises, energy is a sociotechnical force impacting Native American landscapes, bodies, and communities. A critical understanding of settler colonialism today requires an understanding of these material-semiotic flows of energy as they profoundly constitute places and politics, for many Native Nations. Using ethnographic and historical texts, as well as fiction, visual artwork, and poetry, we will consider how energy is never solely a technical or scientific process, but is fundamentally a social practice, always embedded in complex, uneven relations of power. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ANTHR 7145 - Indigeneity and Energy in Native America

A martial artist learns movements and quirks unique to his teacher. A dancer conveys unbearable sorrow with a curve of her back. An artist's charcoal flies across the page. Horse and rider make a pirouette in perfect balance. This course emerges from the idea that we know our worlds through movement. Using texts drawn from anthropology, philosophy, sensory studies, science studies, and animal studies, this course pushes against any simple division of mind and body by examining balance, kinesthesia, and proprioception as often-neglected means of knowing our worlds. It also critiques the static and fixed nature of "rational-centric" thinking, considering how the movement energy of living beings challenges and disrupts division, separation, and stabilization. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.

Full details for ANTHR 7146 - Moving and Knowing

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

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

Çatalhöyük, a famous Neolithic site in Turkey, is known for its large size, its spectacular wall paintings and other art, and its highly structured houses.  It is also a nexus of many key issues in current archaeology: the roles of science and the humanities in archaeological theory and practice, public archaeology, and the intersection of politics and archaeology, for example.  It is a key site for the understanding of animal domestication, Neolithic religion, gender relations in the prehistoric Near East, and the effects of aggregated settlement.  In this course, we will use the site as a lens to examine these and other issues in archaeological practice in general and the Neolithic of the Near East in particular.

Full details for ANTHR 7262 - Catalhoyuk and Archaeological Practice

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 production seminar is for students with basic documentary filmmaking skills who want to work with previously collected footage and/or are in production on a project in or around Ithaca. Over the course of the semester, students complete a documentary film based on an immersive engagement with their selected subject matter. Alongside watching and discussing relevant texts and films, students will complete exercises to help them focus their projects, build a cohesive narrative, learn script writing, brainstorm scene ideas, overcome narrative challenges, discover their aesthetic, and develop a film circulation plan. Students will regularly present new footage and scenes and explain their work in terms their goals for the final project. The course culminates in a public screening of students' independent video projects.

Full details for ANTHR 7401 - Advanced Documentary Production

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

Full details for ANTHR 7413 - Walter Benjamin

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 7540 - Problems in Himalayan Studies

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

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

What is "religion," and how can we use material culture to investigate ancient beliefs and rituals? This course (1) explores major themes and problems in the archaeology of ancient Greek religion, and (2) compares and critiques selected theoretical and methodological approaches to the "archaeology of cult" more generally. Students will consider and analyze ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation). 

Full details for ANTHR 7758 - Archaeology of Greek Religion: Theory, Methods, and Practice

A bi-weekly 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

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

Throughout most of the human career, people survived by hunting and gathering wild foods. The advent of food production is one of the most profound changes in (pre)history. This course examines the current evidence for the appearance and spread of agriculture (plant and animal domestication) around the world. We will consider definitions of agriculture and domestication, the conditions under which it arises, the consequences for those who adopt it, and why it has spread over most of the world.

Full details for ARKEO 2201 - Early Agriculture

"Heritage" typically conjures images of a glorified human past, and evokes sentiments of care for lost or endangered cultures that symbolize humanity's diversity. But heritage is also the foundation for a multi-billion dollar tourist industry and a basis for claims to national sovereignty. A closer look at heritage reveals institutions, places, and things possessed of extraordinary power. Drawing on case studies from around the world, this course attends to the complexities of heritage today. Topics include heritage ethics, tourism and the marketing of the past, approaches to preservation and management, disputed heritage and violence, heritage ideologies from nationalism to universalism, participation and inequality from the grassroots to the global, "counterheritage", and the practice of public archaeology. Students apply insights gained by designing projects as heritage practitioners, engaged with "heritage-scapes" at Cornell and beyond.

Full details for ARKEO 2465 - Global Heritage

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

A survey of the history and development of ships and seafaring as revealed by shipwrecks, boat burials, texts, art, and other evidence. The role of nautical technology and seafaring among the maritime peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world-Canaanites, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans-and the riverine cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt is addressed. The survey stretches from the earliest evidence for Mediterranean seafaring around 10,000 bce to the first transatlantic voyages in the 15th century, including Arab, Viking, and European explorers, and the birth of modern capitalism in the Italian Maritime Republics. Along the way, economics, war, exploration, cult, life at sea, and colonization are discussed.

Full details for ARKEO 2661 - Ancient Ships and Seafaring: Introduction to Nautical Archaeology

Did the Greeks really paint their marble statues? Did the Romans make wax death masks? Should the British Museum return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece? Come and explore all these questions and more in "An Introduction to the Ancient World in 24 Objects". Each class will focus on a single artefact, showing how it is exemplary of key trends and historical moments in Greek and Roman culture, from the temples of ancient Athens to the necropoleis of Roman Egypt and the rainy outposts of Hadrian's Wall. In addition to the history of Greco-Roman art in antiquity, we will explore the influence of Classical art on later Western culture, paying special attention to its complex (and often problematic) political ramifications. While focusing on major monuments from Classical antiquity in class, we will also examine Cornell's collection of plaster casts, ancient objects in the Johnson Museum, and the Greek and Roman collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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

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

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

Full details for ARKEO 3235 - Bioarchaeology

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish "discovery" not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record.  Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence.  The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 3245 - Across the Seas: Contacts between the Americas and the Old World Before Columbus

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas.  The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion.  We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion.  Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authors.  We then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization.  We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

Full details for ARKEO 3255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

This course continues to expose students to the earliest written language, Sumerian, begun in Sumerian Language and Culture I. It also tackles important historical and cultural questions of third millennium Mesopotamia, especially from 2500-2000 BCE.  Each week will explore the specifics of Sumerian grammar and phonology through increasingly complex Sumerian documents.  This semester focuses on Sumerian business, government, and economic documents as well as the language of Sumerian literature.  Extra readings and discussion will provide a sense of the deep roots of the Sumerian historical memory and the problems and research questions that interest Sumerologists, such as reconstructing trading networks, the working classes, ancient taxation, and scribal training.  Students will also be encouraged to explore the ways that the field of Sumerology has embraced digital technology.

Full details for ARKEO 3662 - Sumerian Language and Culture II

This seminar course will explore the management structures that define, protect, and defend cultural heritage. The course will train students to conduct ethnographic investigations of heritage institutions in a transnational context. The course will examine the history of global, national, and local cultural heritage. Students in this class will gain a nuanced understanding of how and why heritage is managed, monitored, and preserved by transnational institutions, including UNESCO, national and municipal governments, and local communities. This course is intended to prepare students to work within the heritage industry, both as participants and as critical observers. Students will learn methodologies central to the analysis of cultural heritage as well as how to navigate a wide range of issues concerned with heritage management and preservation.

Full details for ARKEO 4056 - Heritage Management: Understanding Techniques and Practices

How do humans live with the ruins we create? What lifeways and lifeforms do ruins sustain? What forces cause the remnants of late modernity to endure or erode? Through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar interrogates ruination as a condition of the human experience—one that has intensified in the afterlife of modernity, and one whose study might help us cope with advancing planetary decline, even as we work to curb it. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses

Full details for ARKEO 4143 - Life in Ruins

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

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

This course provides a hands-on introduction to analytical methods in archaeology, focusing on the circa 1688-1715 Onöndowa'ga:' (Seneca) White Springs site, located near Geneva, New York. White Springs was a densely-occupied Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) town of about 8 acres that held as many as 100 longhouses and was home to 1700-2000 people; its residents interacted with European colonists and many other indigenous groups. Students will generate new archaeological interpretations by analyzing artifact assemblages recovered by Cornell excavations undertaken in 2007-2015. Readings provide essential background on the history and material culture of the White Springs era. Students will prepare 15-page analytical papers which can draw on field data, museum collections, historical texts, or a combination of these sources.

Full details for ARKEO 4260 - Analyzing the Archaeological Record: The White Springs Site

Çatalhöyük, a famous Neolithic site in Turkey, is known for its large size, its spectacular wall paintings and other art, and its highly structured houses.  It is also a nexus of many key issues in current archaeology: the roles of science and the humanities in archaeological theory and practice, public archaeology, and the intersection of politics and archaeology, for example.  It is a key site for the understanding of animal domestication, Neolithic religion, gender relations in the prehistoric Near East, and the effects of aggregated settlement.  In this course, we will use the site as a lens to examine these and other issues in archaeological practice in general and the Neolithic of the Near East in particular.

Full details for ARKEO 4262 - Catalhoyuk and Archaeological Practice

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

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

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

Independent work under the close guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 4981 - Honors Thesis Research

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

Full details for ARKEO 4982 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

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

Full details for ARKEO 6000 - Graduate Independent Study in Archaeology

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

Full details for ARKEO 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course considers the possibility of connections between the America and the Old World before the Spanish "discovery" not only as an empirical question, but also as an intensely controversial issue that has tested the limits of the scholarly detachment that archaeologists imagine characterizes their perspectives. We will consider the evidence for several possible episodes of interaction as well as the broader issue of how long-distance interaction can be recognized in the archaeological record.  Transoceanic contact is a common element in popular visions of the American past, but most professional archaeologists have rejected the possibility with great vehemence.  The issue provides an interesting case study in the power of orthodoxy in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 6245 - Across the Seas: Contacts between the Americas and the Old World Before Columbus

An introduction to ancient Mesoamerica, focusing on the nature and development of societies that are arguably the most complex to develop anywhere in the precolumbian Americas.  The course provides a summary of the history of the region before the European invasion, but the emphasis is on the organization of Mesoamerican societies: the distinctive features of Mesoamerican cities, economies, political systems, religion.  We begin by considering Mesoamerican societies at the time of the Spanish invasion.  Our focus will be on descriptions of the Aztecs of Central Mexico by Europeans and indigenous survivors, in an attempt to extract from them a model of the fundamental organizational features of one Mesoamerican society, making allowances for what we can determine about the perspectives and biases of their authors.  We then review the precolumbian history of Mesoamerica looking for variations on these themes as well as indications of alternative forms of organization.  We will also look at such issues as the transition from mobile to sedentary lifeways, the processes involved in the domestication of plants and animals, the emergence of cities and states, and the use of invasion-period and ethnographic information to interpret precolumbian societies in comparative perspective.

Full details for ARKEO 6255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

This course continues to expose students to the earliest written language, Sumerian, begun in Sumerian Language and Culture I. It also tackles important historical and cultural questions of third millennium Mesopotamia, especially from 2500-2000 BCE.  Each week will explore the specifics of Sumerian grammar and phonology through increasingly complex Sumerian documents.  This semester focuses on Sumerian business, government, and economic documents as well as the language of Sumerian literature.  Extra readings and discussion will provide a sense of the deep roots of the Sumerian historical memory and the problems and research questions that interest Sumerologists, such as reconstructing trading networks, the working classes, ancient taxation, and scribal training.  Students will also be encouraged to explore the ways that the field of Sumerology has embraced digital technology.

Full details for ARKEO 6662 - Sumerian Language and Culture II

This seminar course will explore the management structures that define, protect, and defend cultural heritage. The course will train students to conduct ethnographic investigations of heritage institutions in a transnational context. The course will examine the history of global, national, and local cultural heritage. Students in this class will gain a nuanced understanding of how and why heritage is managed, monitored, and preserved by transnational institutions, including UNESCO, national and municipal governments, and local communities. This course is intended to prepare students to work within the heritage industry, both as participants and as critical observers. Students will learn methodologies central to the analysis of cultural heritage as well as how to navigate a wide range of issues concerned with heritage management and preservation.

Full details for ARKEO 7056 - Heritage Management: Understanding Techniques and Practices

How do humans live with the ruins we create? What lifeways and lifeforms do ruins sustain? What forces cause the remnants of late modernity to endure or erode? Through the lens of archaeology, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, art, and architecture, this interdisciplinary seminar interrogates ruination as a condition of the human experience—one that has intensified in the afterlife of modernity, and one whose study might help us cope with advancing planetary decline, even as we work to curb it. For longer description and instructor bio, visit societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.

Full details for ARKEO 7143 - Life in Ruins

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

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

Çatalhöyük, a famous Neolithic site in Turkey, is known for its large size, its spectacular wall paintings and other art, and its highly structured houses.  It is also a nexus of many key issues in current archaeology: the roles of science and the humanities in archaeological theory and practice, public archaeology, and the intersection of politics and archaeology, for example.  It is a key site for the understanding of animal domestication, Neolithic religion, gender relations in the prehistoric Near East, and the effects of aggregated settlement.  In this course, we will use the site as a lens to examine these and other issues in archaeological practice in general and the Neolithic of the Near East in particular.

Full details for ARKEO 7262 - Catalhoyuk and Archaeological Practice

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

What is "religion," and how can we use material culture to investigate ancient beliefs and rituals? This course (1) explores major themes and problems in the archaeology of ancient Greek religion, and (2) compares and critiques selected theoretical and methodological approaches to the "archaeology of cult" more generally. Students will consider and analyze ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation). 

Full details for ARKEO 7758 - Archaeology of Greek Religion: Theory, Methods, and Practice

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

Full details for ARKEO 8902 - Master's Thesis