141 - 150 of 166 results for: CLASSICS

How do people and their artifacts connect? Just what is the subject of archaeological history? A seminar reviewing the latest materialist approaches in archaeology and heritage studies.

How do we define cities and urban space, and why and how does that matter? How did cities and urban space work in the ancient Mediterranean? In this graduate seminar, we will work through some fundamental theoretical writings on cities and urbanism, including Childe and his critics, Weber, Lynch and Jacobs, LeFebvre, Hillier and Hanson, Harvey, Soja and others. We will explore the ways in which these ideas have been applied or could be applied to the ancient Mediterranean world, and we will read comparative material on other urban traditions to help us think through the issues.

TBD

The ancient world enjoys scholarly traditions of both grand pan-Mediterranean narratives and focused studies of the individual landscapes and peoples who comprise them. Within archaeology, these latter explorations generally rely on expedient geographical designations, modern political boundaries, or survey areas as focused ¿regions¿ for discussion. Defining and interrogating the regions created and experienced by ancient peoples and assembling these into a coherent larger ancient picture proves far more difficult. This seminar explores the varied forms of ancient regionalisms¿from archaeological (architecture, ceramics, coinage, sculpture, etc.) to social (language, religion, etc.)¿and tools for investigating such patterns of human interaction.

This seminar explores the interrelated mechanics, aesthetics, and economics of the monumental construction programs that characterized Classical Greece and Rome. Using archaeological remains of architecture alongside the crucial corpus of written testimony (especially Vitruvius), we investigate how and why immense resources were lavished on monumental projects in antiquity and what practical impact such projects might have had on ancient citizens and spectators, their cities, and the economy more broadly.

This seminar examines the interplay between classical archaeologists¿ conceptions and analyses of ancient Mediterranean environments. These themes loom large now - during what might be called the ¿environmental turn¿ of the Anthropocene in the humanities and social sciences - and their increasing resonance provides the basis for critical reflection of the discipline¿s past and future trends. Topics will include: environmental determinism, ¿non-human¿ agency, the role of science in archaeological/historical practice, and the compartmentalization of environment/climate as analytic focus.

TBD

The the ancient Mediterranean was highly interconnected is common knowledge, and the idea of integration has become a defining factory in current approaches to Greco-Roman cultural identities. Yet how connectivity functiond, and how we should effectively analyze it, are less well understood. This seminar highlights emerging network approaches--both broad theoretical network paradigms and specific network science methodologies--as conceptual tools for archaeological and historical investigations of cultural interaction (economic, religious, artistic, colonial, etc.) across the Mediterranean world.

(Formerly CLASSART 342.) The archaeological study of Roman slavery has been severely limited by a focus on identifying the traces of slaves in the material record. This seminar explores a range of newer and more broadly conceived approaches to understanding slavery and slaves' experiences, including spatial analysis, bioarchaeology, epigraphy, visual imagery, and comparative archaeologies of slavery. Students will learn about the current state of research, work with different kinds of evidence and a range of methodologies, and develop original research projects of their own.