Anthropology 5
Archaeology:
Living in the Material World

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The material world is more than just what’s ‘out there’.  Material culture shapes our very lives.  It is where we live, what we eat, the bodies we make, the tools we use.  Things are an inherent part of human life.  This understanding allows archaeology -- as the recovery and interpretation of material culture from the past -- to know about people and cultures that no longer exist.  This course studies material culture as both a human and an archaeological way of knowing that makes things more a part of living than we usually think.

The course begins by considering material objects as containers and representations of cultural meaning.  This section covers the theories of material culture and explicit studies that ground ideas in the contemporary material world around us.  The course then turns to analysis of material culture in archaeology.  Lacking much of the contextual data that contemporary material culture studies employ, archaeologists have devised numerous means for understanding the meaning of things from the past.  Readings, lectures, and assignments review these methods and case studies show how past cultures are reconstructed through the analysis of the archaeological record.  This class provides an introduction to field and laboratory methods in archaeology as well as the practice of archaeological interpretation.

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