Social Anthropology and Archaeology (Combined Track in Anthropology) Class of 2025
Hello everyone! My name is Kade McGovern and I am a junior on a combined track studying social anthropology and archaeology with a secondary in computer...
This is a lab-based class intended to showcase how experimentation helps to answer archaeological questions. Students will participate in experimental modules, conducting experiments, collecting and analyzing data and writing up short lab reports. Each module will start with a discussion of an issue in archaeology, a question related to that issue. The students will then conduct the experiments and collect the data. Finally, students will learn common methods for data analysis to write up their results. Each module will end with...
All good research begins with a strong foundation. This course is aimed at providing you with the foundational knowledge and basic tools you need to succeed as a professional archaeologist. Aided in part by guest speakers from within and beyond Harvard, this course emphasizes collaborative research, presentation, publication, grant proposal writing, conflict resolution, and other skills to help you complete your PhD and to be competitive on the job market afterwards, and to navigate the complex intellectual, social,...
This seminar delves into the world’s earliest cities: their origins, their operations, and their collapses. It considers how we define this term, and why every...
This is a quantitative methods course geared toward archaeological data analysis. The course will focus on types of data, descriptive and analytical statistics, and mapping and spatial relationships. Students will become familiar with multiple commonly used software packages to conduct analyses.
What does the food we eat tell us about ourselves—as individuals, communities, and countries—and how has humanity’s relationship with food changed over time?
We all need to eat and drink each day to nourish our bodies. Yet how often do you pause to think deeply about why you eat what you eat? Your food habits are likely influenced by family traditions, but also by a range of other factors like income, age, ethnicity, religion, politics, and the environment. What does the food we eat tell us about...
This course will cover the archaeological record of the Pleistocene. Students will gain an understanding of the biological and geological setting of the time period, with a biogeographic overview of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, including the geological setting of the African continent. The course will cover the Early, Middle, and Late Pleistocene archaeological records of Africa in detail, with comparisons to the Eurasian records and discuss the methods through which we study these time periods. The discussion sections will...
Archaeology has focused traditionally on excavations of settlement sites. However, no settlement existed as an island; ancient peoples moved within a larger environment which constrained their actions while it was...
This course offers an introduction to eight major areas of archaeological science: (1) relative and absolute dating, (2) human osteology, (3) paleoethnobotany and micro remains, (4) stable isotopes, (5) organic residue analysis, (6) zooarchaeology and ZooMS, (7) proteomics, and (8) paleogenomics. Students will gain an understanding of the history of the field and its future directions, the method and theory behind how different tools and techniques work, and how archaeological science is...
