World Archaeology

This course will enable students to rectify a criticism which is often levelled against historians: that the field is becoming increasingly narrow, hyper-specialized, and does not prepare students to grapple with large-scale, long-term changes and processes, and to be able to formulate analogies with case studies from different parts of the world and periods of time. At the end of the course, students will be able to: 1) gain an understanding of the human and natural factors which led to the formation of large political, social, and cultural units in different areas in the world, 2) be able to differentiate superficial short-term processes of change from more profound but subtle evolutionary trajectories by isolating and comparing specific attributes found in case studies derived from different eras, 3) develop processes of reasoning which will enable them to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causal factors, and dependent versus independent variables which fostered the growth of large-scale socio-cultural units with specific geographical correlates and boundaries or frontiers, and be able to explain why these variables differ when discussing the origins of political, technological, economic, or religious institutions and adaptations in various parts of the world, and 4) be able to identify and critique hypotheses and assumptions advanced by some basic works of scholarship dealing with topics on which the course focuses: for example, what constitutes a common long-term evolutionary trend which can be compared across different places and times, and what superficial differences mask or obscure common evolutionary processes between different societies or geographical regions?