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.

Catalog Distribution: (WRT-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS) (OPHLS-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2400 - Cultural Diversity and Contemporary Issues

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.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

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

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

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

Who lived in the Ithaca area before American settlers and Cornell arrived? Where do these indigenous peoples reside today? This class explores the history and culture of the Gayogoho:no (Cayuga), which means people from the mucky land. We will read perspectives by indigenous authors, as well as archaeologists and historians, about past and current events, try to understand reasons why that history has been fragmented and distorted by more recent settlers, and delve into primary sources documenting encounters between settlers and the Gayogoho:no. We will also strive to understand the ongoing connections of the Gayogoho:no to this region despite forced dispossession and several centuries of colonialist exclusion from these lands and waters. 

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2720 - From the Swampy Land: Indigenous People of the Ithaca Area

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 2729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

This course is organized around the central theme of reproductive justice. It interrogates the connections between reproductive politics and policy, engaged research, and public health. By approaching reproduction through the lens of justice, we as a class will engage in sustained reflection on the place of reproduction within health, healthcare, and activism. The course situates reproduction and reproductive health within historical trajectories of health activism and governance, including but not limited to abortion, assisted reproduction, and immigration.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 3041 - Reproductive Justice

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.  

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS, SSC-AS) (OPHLS-AG, SBA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

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 authorsWe 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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

This course is a place-based seminar focused on key issues in contemporary urban nature, from the built environments of homes and neighborhoods, to infrastructures of waste and water management, to waterways, forests, and parks. Using the city of London as a case-study, students will explore topics including migration and racism; health and environmental justice; gentrification and public housing; "green" landscaping; climate change preparedness; and natural disaster. For the first eight weeks of the course, weekly seminars at Cornell will feature readings and discussions on these and other topics, drawn from anthropology, geography, sociology, and neighboring academic fields. Along the way, students will design independent projects focused on the history, ecology, and landscape of a particular neighborhood of the city. During spring break, the entire class will travel to London for one week in which we will be joined by local experts to explore the places and problems introduced in the first eight weeks. Students will carry out their independent research in London and present the results upon return.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3430 - London’s Transforming Urban Environment

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 examine ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation).

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3839 - Archaeology of Ancient Greek Religion

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 3950 - Humanities Scholars Research Methods

This course explores the implications and significance of using textual materials as anthropological evidence. While participant observation remains the cornerstone of ethnography, literary, archival, and other written works are increasingly being utilized as primary sources within the anthropological project. This course will hence offer an overview of anthropological works that trace the intersections between cultural production and the literary imagination. Rather than consider the literary elements of ethnography itself, we will strive to understand the disparate forms of social phenomena—both knowledge and practices—that arise from texts and textual practices specifically. Examples include analyses of literary cultures, media forms and non-traditional textual sources, bureaucratic structures, the use of archives, and more. Particular attention will be paid to works based in the Middle East and the Islamic world. By examining the different theoretical, political, and ethical considerations of using the written word as ethnographic evidence, we will be able to shed light on the anthropological project as a whole.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4013 - Textual Ethnography

The Caucasus occupies a distinctive place in the historical and cultural imagination, a region long anchored to tropes of disobedience, punishment, and redemption. It is also a place in which liminality, betwixt and between Europe and Asia, endures as both a perceived geographic imaginary and an experienced condition in the detritus of Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet imperialisms. This course explores the Caucasus through its anthropology, history, and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Russian conquest, Soviet socialism, and the conflicts and capitalist formations of the post-Soviet decades. We will examine the entanglements of the region's history, political economy, and geopolitics in order to get a sense of the array of forces shaping the Caucasus today.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4030 - The Caucasus: Captives, Cultures, Conflicts

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4220 - Inkas and their Empire

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4401 - Advanced Documentary Production

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations—conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more—we ask how "the environment" manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4417 - Ecopolitics

Grounded in anthropological and interdisciplinary analyses of policing, prisons, and security, this course aims to account for how carcerality shapes our worlds. Attentive to specificity and variability across place and time, we will consider how carceral logics take hold and expand, and how they are contested and reimagined. We will pay particular attention to the interrelatedness of race and carcerality; lived experiences of carcerality, including those of people imprisoned in various contexts and those engaged in carceral work; the intersections between carcerality and science and technology; and abolitionist frameworks that address the limitations and constitutive oppressions of carcerality as they radically reimagine other possibilities.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4476 - Carceral Worlds: Policing, Prisons, and Securitization

This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4489 - Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS, GLC-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4490 - The Sexual Politics of Religion

This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4513 - Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia

Topics will address South Asian culture and literature and change in relation to curricular needs within the Department of Asian Studies.

Full details for ANTHR 4514 - Topics in South Asian Culture and Literature

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

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4620 - Jewish Cities

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

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

We will explore the thesis that far from being dead and therefore gone, the continued presence of the dead is absolutely foundational for the workings of Jewishness. What that "presence" could possibly mean, to us who do not usually think in terms of immortal spirit, will be a central puzzle for our discussions. We will also have scope for consideration of ways in which the continuing "weight" of the dead may inhibit needed change and rethinking. Readings will include selections from the Babylonian Talmud, work in early modern cultural history, and studies of the culture of death and dying in contemporary Jewish communities, including the life and culture of Jewish cemeteries, especially in the New York area.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4700 - The Jewish Dead

The relationship between North American Indian peoples and the states of Canada and the US is in many ways unique, a product of centuries of trade compacts, treaties, legislation, warfare, land claim negotiations, and Supreme Court decisions. Apparently straightforward concepts such as "land," "property," and "sovereignty," based as they are on European cultural assumptions, often seem inadequate for making sense of the cross-cultural terrain of Indian-State relations, where they tend to take on new – and often ambiguous – meanings. In this course we will explore some of these ambiguous meanings, attending to the cultural realities they reflect and the social relationships they shape. Then we will examine the complex interplay of legal, political, and cultural forces by taking an in-depth look at several selected case studies.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4725 - American Indian Lands and Sovereignties

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ANTHR 4755 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for ANTHR 4790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas

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

Full details for ANTHR 4910 - Independent Study: Undergrad I

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

Full details for ANTHR 4920 - Independent Study: Undergrad II

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

Full details for ANTHR 4984 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

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

Full details for ANTHR 4992 - Honors Workshop II

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

Full details for ANTHR 6025 - Proseminar in Anthropology

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

This studio-style seminar provides an in-depth examination of the principles and practices of archaeological research design. We will examine all aspects of the research process, from concept formation, to methodology, to ethical practice and data management. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake a series of projects that will build incrementally into a research proposal. We will focus on developing the skills vital to designing archaeological research, starting with the formulation of a question and continuing through the exploratory process of defining proper sites, assemblages, analytical techniques, and presentation of findings. Class sessions will focus on designing research projects examining case studies drawn from world archaeology and student research projects.

Full details for ANTHR 6250 - Archaeological Research Design

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 required seminar for the new graduate minor in media studies considers media from a wide number of perspectives, ranging from the methods of cinema and television studies to those of music, information science, communication, science and technology studies, and beyond. Historical and theoretical approaches to media are intertwined with meta-critical reflections on media studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Close attention will be paid to media's role in shaping and being shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed categories of identity and sociality.

Full details for ANTHR 6400 - Thinking Media Studies

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 will critically examine the key texts that have informed our understanding of the nation and nationalism. Beginning with some of the founding texts such as Hahn Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Backgrounds, Plamenatz's Two Types of Nationalism, and Renan's What is a Nation, we will then move on to more contemporary writings by Gellner, Hobsbawm and Anderson and end with analytical approaches addressing the national question in postcolonial contexts such as Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A central theme will be how culture, power, and history are implicated in the concept of Nation. We will also explore the possibilities of an ethnographic approach to the nation and ask if such an analytical and methodological move may help us better grapple with the perplexing emotive dimension of nationalisms.

Full details for ANTHR 6482 - Perspectives on the Nation

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ANTHR 6729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

This course explores the implications and significance of using textual materials as anthropological evidence. While participant observation remains the cornerstone of ethnography, literary, archival, and other written works are increasingly being utilized as primary sources within the anthropological project. This course will hence offer an overview of anthropological works that trace the intersections between cultural production and the literary imagination. Rather than consider the literary elements of ethnography itself, we will strive to understand the disparate forms of social phenomena—both knowledge and practices—that arise from texts and textual practices specifically. Examples include analyses of literary cultures, media forms and non-traditional textual sources, bureaucratic structures, the use of archives, and more. Particular attention will be paid to works based in the Middle East and the Islamic world. By examining the different theoretical, political, and ethical considerations of using the written word as ethnographic evidence, we will be able to shed light on the anthropological project as a whole.

Full details for ANTHR 7013 - Textual Ethnography

The Caucasus occupies a distinctive place in the historical and cultural imagination, a region long anchored to tropes of disobedience, punishment, and redemption. It is also a place in which liminality, betwixt and between Europe and Asia, endures as both a perceived geographic imaginary and an experienced condition in the detritus of Persian, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet imperialisms. This course explores the Caucasus through its anthropology, history, and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Russian conquest, Soviet socialism, and the conflicts and capitalist formations of the post-Soviet decades. We will examine the entanglements of the region's history, political economy, and geopolitics in order to get a sense of the array of forces shaping the Caucasus today.

Full details for ANTHR 7030 - The Caucasus: Captives, Cultures, Conflicts

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

Full details for ANTHR 7220 - Inkas and their Empire

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

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations—conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more—we ask how "the environment" manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.

Full details for ANTHR 7417 - Ecopolitics

Grounded in anthropological and interdisciplinary analyses of policing, prisons, and security, this course aims to account for how carcerality shapes our worlds. Attentive to specificity and variability across place and time, we will consider how carceral logics take hold and expand, and how they are contested and reimagined. We will pay particular attention to the interrelatedness of race and carcerality; lived experiences of carcerality, including those of people imprisoned in various contexts and those engaged in carceral work; the intersections between carcerality and science and technology; and abolitionist frameworks that address the limitations and constitutive oppressions of carcerality as they radically reimagine other possibilities.

Full details for ANTHR 7476 - Carceral Worlds: Policing, Prisons, and Securitization

This is a semester-long upper division seminar course that will rotate among members of the faculty focusing on different special topics in the fields of abolitionist, critical, and decolonial theories of the social and political.

Full details for ANTHR 7489 - Theory and Anthropology from Below: Special Topics

Drawing on feminist and queer theory and ethnographic studies of ritual and devotional practices around the world this course will consider the relationships among the social organization of sexuality, embodiment of gender, nationalisms and everyday forms of worship. In addition to investigating the norms of family, gender, sex and the nation embedded in dominant institutionalized forms of religion we will study such phenomena as ritual transgenderism, neo tantrism, theogamy (marriage to a deity), priestly celibacy and temple prostitution. The disciplinary and normalizing effects of religion as well as the possibilities of religiosity as a mode of social dissent will be explored through different ethnographic and fictional accounts of ritual and faithful practices in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Full details for ANTHR 7490 - The Sexual Politics of Religion

This course explores how religious beliefs and practices in Southeast Asia have been transformed by the combined forces of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. By examining both diversity and resurgence in one of the world's most rapidly modernizing regions, we aim to understand the common economic, social, and political conditions that are contributing to the popularity of contemporary religious movements. At the same time, we also consider the unique ideological, theological, and cultural understandings behind different religions and movements. Through this process we also rethink conceptions of modernity.

Full details for ANTHR 7513 - Religion and Politics in Southeast Asia

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

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

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

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 7540 - Problems in Himalayan Studies

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

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

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

Full details for ANTHR 7620 - Jewish Cities

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

Full details for ANTHR 7682 - Medicine and Healing in Africa

We will explore the thesis that far from being dead and therefore gone, the continued presence of the dead is absolutely foundational for the workings of Jewishness. What that "presence" could possibly mean, to us who do not usually think in terms of immortal spirit, will be a central puzzle for our discussions. We will also have scope for consideration of ways in which the continuing "weight" of the dead may inhibit needed change and rethinking. Readings will include selections from the Babylonian Talmud, work in early modern cultural history, and studies of the culture of death and dying in contemporary Jewish communities, including the life and culture of Jewish cemeteries, especially in the New York area.

Full details for ANTHR 7700 - The Jewish Dead

The relationship between North American Indian peoples and the states of Canada and the US is in many ways unique, a product of centuries of trade compacts, treaties, legislation, warfare, land claim negotiations, and Supreme Court decisions. Apparently straightforward concepts such as "land," "property," and "sovereignty," based as they are on European cultural assumptions, often seem inadequate for making sense of the cross-cultural terrain of Indian-State relations, where they tend to take on new – and often ambiguous – meanings. In this course we will explore some of these ambiguous meanings, attending to the cultural realities they reflect and the social relationships they shape. Then we will examine the complex interplay of legal, political, and cultural forces by taking an in-depth look at several selected case studies.

Full details for ANTHR 7725 - American Indian Lands and Sovereignties

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Full details for ANTHR 7755 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Full details for ANTHR 7790 - Latinx Education Across the Americas

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 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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

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

Following the conquests of Alexander, the ancient civilization of Egypt came under Greek rule. This period is best known for its famous queen Cleopatra, the last independent ruler of ancient Egypt. But even before Cleopatra's life and death, the Egypt that she governed was a fascinating place – and a rich case study in cultural interactions under ancient imperialism. This course explores life in Egypt under Greek rule, during the three centuries known as the Ptolemaic period (named after Cleopatra's family, the Ptolemaic dynasty). We will examine the history and culture of Ptolemaic Egypt, an empire at the crossroads of Africa, the Near East, and the Mediterranean. We will explore the experiences of Egyptians, Greeks, and others living in this multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic society. Finally, we will investigate the ways that Ptolemaic Egypt can shed light on modern experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 2688 - Cleopatra's Egypt: Tradition and Transformation

Who lived in the Ithaca area before American settlers and Cornell arrived? Where do these indigenous peoples reside today? This class explores the history and culture of the Gayogoho:no (Cayuga), which means people from the mucky land. We will read perspectives by indigenous authors, as well as archaeologists and historians, about past and current events, try to understand reasons why that history has been fragmented and distorted by more recent settlers, and delve into primary sources documenting encounters between settlers and the Gayogoho:no. We will also strive to understand the ongoing connections of the Gayogoho:no to this region despite forced dispossession and several centuries of colonialist exclusion from these lands and waters. 

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 2720 - From the Swampy Land: Indigenous People of the Ithaca Area

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 2729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

An introduction to the history and theory of writing systems from cuneiform to the alphabet, historical and new writing media, and the complex relationship of writing technologies to human language and culture. Through hands-on activities and collaborative work, students will explore the shifting definitions of "writing" and the diverse ways in which cultures through time have developed and used writing systems. We will also investigate the traditional divisions of "oral" vs. "written" and consider how digital technologies have affected how we use and think about writing in encoding systems from Morse code to emoji.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 2812 - Hieroglyphs to HTML: History of Writing

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.  

Catalog Distribution: (BIO-AS, SSC-AS) (OPHLS-AG, SBA-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS) (HA-AG, SBA-AG)

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 authorsWe 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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 3255 - Ancient Mexico and Central America

The Purpose of this course is to trace the development of Monotheism from its origins in Israelite/Canaanite polytheism. We will examine worship of the God, Yahweh and other deities in ancient Israel, and will trace the long and complicated process by which Yahweh became the sole deity to be formally accepted within Judaism. Using biblical evidence as well as inscriptional and archaeological evidence from Israel and elsewhere in the ancient Near East, we will address the question of why the Israelites eventually rejected deities such as Baal, Asherah, El and others, and how imagery associated with these deities informs biblical descriptions of Yahweh. We will explore the ways in which a small group of Jerusalem elites helped shape the monotheistic tradition that has been inherited in the West, and will consider the political, social and theological implications of this transformation. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 3550 - Origins of Monotheism

The purpose of the course is to place the Bible within the context of a larger ancient world that can be explored by systematic excavation of physical remains. Students will become familiar with archaeological excavations and finds from ancient Syria-Palestine from 10,000 bce to 586 bce. We will explore this archaeological evidence on its own terms, taking into consideration factors such as archaeological method and the interpretive frameworks in which the excavators themselves work, as well as the implications of this body of evidence for understanding the complexity and diversity of biblical Israel.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 3588 - Archaeology and the Bible

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 examine ritual artifacts, cult sites, and other aspects of religious material culture, as well as primary textual sources (in translation).

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for ARKEO 3839 - Archaeology of Ancient Greek Religion

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 4220 - Inkas and their Empire

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 4354 - Byzantine Archaeology

Students will explore sculpture that was commissioned and displayed in mainland Greece between the Archaic and Imperial periods, with a focus on the city of Athens and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. We will examine architectural sculpture, tombs, votive dedications, and civic monuments, with a focus on the relationship between these objects and the religious, political, and funerary contexts in which they were displayed, informed by close visual analysis. The course will be followed by a trip to Greece during Spring Break, when we will visit many of the sites covered during the semester, as well as major collections of sculpture in local museums. Students will give presentations on site in preparation for an extended research paper.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 4711 - Traveling Seminar: Greek Sculpture in Context

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for ARKEO 4755 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

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

Full details for ARKEO 6100 - The Craft of Archaeology

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

Full details for ARKEO 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course 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

This studio-style seminar provides an in-depth examination of the principles and practices of archaeological research design. We will examine all aspects of the research process, from concept formation, to methodology, to ethical practice and data management. Over the course of the semester, students will undertake a series of projects that will build incrementally into a research proposal. We will focus on developing the skills vital to designing archaeological research, starting with the formulation of a question and continuing through the exploratory process of defining proper sites, assemblages, analytical techniques, and presentation of findings. Class sessions will focus on designing research projects examining case studies drawn from world archaeology and student research projects.

Full details for ARKEO 6250 - Archaeological Research Design

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

A seminar on the archaeology of the Byzantine Empire, from the late Roman through to the early modern periods. Topics to be covered include: long-term changes in settlement patterns and urban development; the material traces of state and monastic control over productive landscapes; the idea of the border and the nature of its defense; and the fraught relationship between "Byzantine" and "classical" archaeologies.

Full details for ARKEO 6354 - Byzantine Archaeology

An introduction to the story of how human history from the earliest times through to the recent period interrelates with changing climate conditions on Earth. The course explores the whole expanse of human history, but concentrates on the most recent 15,000 years through to the Little Ice Age (14th-19th centuries AD). Evidence from science, archaeology and history are brought together to assess how climate has shaped the human story.

Full details for ARKEO 6729 - Climate, Archaeology and History

In little more than a century the Inkas created an empire stretching thousands of kilometers along the Andean spine from Ecuador to Chile. This course focuses on the political and economic structure of the empire and on its roots in earlier Andean prehistory. Archaeological remains, along with documents produced in the aftermath of the Spanish invasion, will be used to trace the history of Inka territorial organization, statecraft, and economic relationships and the Colonial transformation of Andean societies.

Full details for ARKEO 7220 - Inkas and their Empire

An exploration of the archaeology and art of the Aegean region and of its neighbors during the Bronze Age, ca. 3000-1000 BCE: the origins and precursors of the Classical World. The course will investigate the emergence of the first complex societies in the Aegean region in the third millennium BCE, and then the development and story of the Minoan and Mycenaean worlds and their neighbors in the second millennium BCE. Topics will include: the Early Bronze Age and the first complex societies in the Aegean (Cyclades, Crete, Greece, Anatolia); the collapse and reorientation around 2200BCE and links with climate change; the first palace civilization of (Minoan) Crete; the Santorini (Thera) volcanic eruption and its historical impact in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean; the rise of the Mycenaean Greek palaces and the shift into proto-history; the development of an international east Mediterranean trade system; Ahhiyawa and the Hittites; the 'Trojan War'; and the collapse of the Late Bronze Age societies and links with climate change.

Full details for ARKEO 7271 - The Aegean and East Mediterranean Bronze Age c. 3000-1000 BCE

Students will explore sculpture that was commissioned and displayed in mainland Greece between the Archaic and Imperial periods, with a focus on the city of Athens and the panhellenic sanctuaries of Delphi and Olympia. We will examine architectural sculpture, tombs, votive dedications, and civic monuments, with a focus on the relationship between these objects and the religious, political, and funerary contexts in which they were displayed, informed by close visual analysis. The course will be followed by a trip to Greece during Spring Break, when we will visit many of the sites covered during the semester, as well as major collections of sculpture in local museums. Students will give presentations on site in preparation for an extended research paper.

Full details for ARKEO 7711 - Traveling Seminar: Greek Sculpture in Context

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Full details for ARKEO 7755 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

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

Full details for ARKEO 8902 - Master's Thesis