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ARCHLGY 115: The Social life of Human Bones (ANTHRO 115, ANTHRO 215)

Skeletal remains serve a primary function of support and protection for the human body. However, beyond this, they have played a range of social roles once an individual is deceased. The processes associated with excarnation, interment, exhumation and reburial all speak to the place that the body, and its parts, play in our cultural as well as physical landscape.This course builds on introductory courses in human skeletal anatomy by adding the social dynamics that govern the way humans treat other humans once they have died. It draws on anthropological, biological and archaeological research, with case studies spanning a broad chronological and spatial framework to provide students with an overview of social practice as it relates to the human body.

Last offered: Autumn 2019 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 116B: Anthropology of the Environment (ANTHRO 116B, ANTHRO 216B)

This seminar interrogates the history of anthropology's approach to the environment, beginning with early functionalist, structuralist, and Marxist accounts of human-environment relationships. It builds towards more recent developments in the field, focusing on nonhuman and relational ontologies as well as current projects on the intersections of nature, capital, politics, and landscape histories. At the end of this class, students will be familiar with the intellectual histories of environmental anthropology and contemporary debates and tensions around questions of ethics, agency, environment, and historical causality.

Last offered: Spring 2022 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 117: Virtual Italy (CLASSICS 115, ENGLISH 115, HISTORY 238C, ITALIAN 115)

Classical Italy attracted thousands of travelers throughout the 1700s. Referring to their journey as the "Grand Tour," travelers pursued intellectual passions, promoted careers, and satisfied wanderlust, all while collecting antiquities to fill museums and estates back home. What can computational approaches tell us about who traveled, where and why? We will read travel accounts; experiment with parsing; and visualize historical data. Final projects to form credited contributions to the Grand Tour Project, a cutting-edge digital platform. No prior programming experience necessary.

Terms: Win | Units: 4-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

Instructors: Ceserani, G. (PI)

ARCHLGY 121B: "The Will to Adorn": An Anthropology of Dress (AFRICAAM 121B, ANTHRO 121B, ANTHRO 221B, ARCHLGY 221B)

This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

Instructors: Flewellen, A. (PI) ; Gupta, S. (TA)

ARCHLGY 124: Archaeology of Food: production, consumption and ritual (ARCHLGY 224)

This course explores many aspects of food in human history from an archaeological perspective. We will discuss how the origins of agriculture helped to transform human society; how food and feasting played a prominent role in the emergence of social hierarchies and the development of civilization; and how various foodways influenced particular cultures. We will also conduct experimental studies to understand how certain methods of food procurement, preparation, and consumption can be recovered archaeologically.

Last offered: Winter 2023 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 127: Heritage Politics (ANTHRO 127D, ARCHLGY 227)

Heritage is a matter of the heart and not the brain, David Lowenthal once said. It does not seek to explore the past, but to domesticate it and enlist it for present causes. From the drafting of the first royal decrees on ancient monuments in the 17th century, political interests have had a hand in deciding which traditions, monuments and sites best represent and best serve the needs of the nation. The sum of these domestication efforts, the laws, institutions and practices established to protect and manage heritage, is what we call heritage governance. In this seminar you will learn about the politics of 21st century heritage governance at national and international level. Students will become familiar with key conventions and learn about the functioning of heritage institutions. We will also examine the hidden practices and current political developments that impact heritage governance: how UNESCO heritage sites become bargaining tools in international relations, how EU heritage policies are negotiated in the corridors of Brussels, and how the current re-nationalization of Western politics can affect what we come to know as our common past.

Last offered: Spring 2019 | UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 128: Europe Before the Romans: Early Complex Societies (CLASSICS 128)

This course will provide a broad introduction to theories of change in early complex societies and polities. Over the course of the quarter, we will examine a series of hotly debated theoretical frameworks. From the beginning, you will develop a case study for your final research paper using an appropriate theoretical framework. The course will look at a series of global case studies but will focus specifically on western Europe¿s protohistoric Iron Age (c.800¿100BCE), a period of technological innovation, rich art and cultural expression, rapidly growing connectivity and trade, alongside rapid social and political change.

Last offered: Winter 2021 | UG Reqs: WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 129: Archaeology of Gender and Sexuality (ANTHRO 111, ANTHRO 211B, FEMGEN 119)

How archaeologists study sex, sexuality, and gender through the material remains left behind by past cultures and communities. Theoretical and methodological issues; case studies from prehistoric and historic archaeology.

Last offered: Autumn 2019 | UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

ARCHLGY 132: Living in Places Studying Spaces: Archlgical and Crit. approaches to Spatial Production and Practice

This class will provide students with an understanding of space as socially constituted in the interactions between people and things. It will explore the multiple scales at which space is constituted and the modalities of this production. This exploration will emphasize the role and constitution of power, and consequently politics, in these interactions. In doing so, it also provides a historical introduction to several theories of space as they have been mobilized to examine spatial relations and explain social relations and change, including environmental adaptation, political relations, and identity and ideology. It also equips students with a body of theoretical tools to examine the spaces and places they find themselves in and might examine academically. As such then this class will equip students with the ability to move beyond perceptions of space as a `container,' within which things, people and practices are located along x,y, and z axes, to instead understand the ways in whi more »

This class will provide students with an understanding of space as socially constituted in the interactions between people and things. It will explore the multiple scales at which space is constituted and the modalities of this production. This exploration will emphasize the role and constitution of power, and consequently politics, in these interactions. In doing so, it also provides a historical introduction to several theories of space as they have been mobilized to examine spatial relations and explain social relations and change, including environmental adaptation, political relations, and identity and ideology. It also equips students with a body of theoretical tools to examine the spaces and places they find themselves in and might examine academically. As such then this class will equip students with the ability to move beyond perceptions of space as a `container,' within which things, people and practices are located along x,y, and z axes, to instead understand the ways in which places and the relationships between them are constituted, to produce space. Further, in understanding the constitution of space, it will elaborate the relationships between space, ideology, and socio-political order. This attention to the constitution of space, will equip them to both understand and explain why `Landscape (parsed as space in the usage of this class) is politics,' as Smith argues in the introductory reading of this class in week 1.

| UG Reqs: WAY-SI

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