Courses

Mesopotamia is often defined by "firsts": the first villages, cities, states, and empires. Archaeology has long looked to the region for explanations of the origins of civilization. The modern countries of the region, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, have also long been places where archaeology and politics are inextricably intertwined, from Europe's 19th century appropriation of the region's heritage, to the looting and destruction of antiquities in recent wars. This introductory course moves between past and present. It offers a survey of more than 10,000 years of human history, from the appearance of farming villages to the dawn of imperialism, while also engaging current debates on the contemporary stakes of archaeology in the southwest Asia. Our focus is on past material worlds and the modern politics in which they are entangled.

Full details for ARKEO 2010 - Archaeology of Mesopotamia

An introduction to the origins and development of Western medicine in ancient Greece and Rome. We will read a variety of sources on the ancient theory and practice of medicine, including pre-Hippocratic works, the Hippocratic corpus, and the prolific and opinionated Galen. These texts will be complemented by secondary sources which will put them in scientific and social context, as well as by visual and material evidence. Questions to be considered will include the treatment of women, the relationship between medicine and magic, the evolving state of the arts of anatomy and physiology, and rival schools of thought about the right way to acquire medical knowledge.

Full details for ARKEO 2640 - Introduction to Ancient Medicine

This introductory course explores the roles of amulets, love potions, curse tablets, and many other magical practices in ancient Greek and Roman societies. In this course, you will learn how to invoke the powers of Abrasax, become successful and famous, get people to fall desperately in love with you, and cast horrible curses on your enemies! We will also examine a range of ancient and modern approaches to "magic" as a concept: what exactly do we mean by "magic," and how does it relate to other spheres of activity, like religion, science, and philosophy? When people (in ancient times or today) label the activities of others as "magic," what are the social and political consequences of that act? As we investigate the practices that Greeks and Romans considered "magical," we will also explore what those practices can teach us about many other aspects of life in the past, such as social class, gender, religion, and ethnic and cultural identity.

Full details for ARKEO 2846 - Magic and Witchcraft in the Greco-Roman World

Undergraduate students pursue topics of particular interest under the guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 3000 - Undergraduate Independent Study in Archaeology and Related Fields

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ARKEO 3040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

This course provides students with an orientation to the new technologies reshaping the effort to preserve cultural heritage. The course introduces students to the tools that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing (especially aerial and satellite imaging) provide for advancing heritage preservation and detecting cultural erasure. Our focus will be on contexts where heritage has emerged as a site of conflict, from Bosnia to Syria to Ukraine. Students will develop proficiency in a range of spatial technologies and their application to the human past. The course will culminate in projects that use new technologies to save heritage at risk. 

Full details for ARKEO 3200 - Heritage Forensics

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.  

Full details for ARKEO 3235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ARKEO 3248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ARKEO 4005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 4025 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for "decolonizing" museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.

Full details for ARKEO 4035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art

This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.

Full details for ARKEO 4166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ARKEO 4227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ARKEO 4240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 4257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 4264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

Early states emerged when select groups gained control over wealth and power and institutionalized that control. How this was accomplished is a question of political economy that we can approach from archaeological, anthropological, and sociological perspectives. The course introduces students to the intellectual development of historical materialism in Smith, Marx, and Weber, among others, and traces their influence on later socioeconomic historians such as Polanyi and Finley. More recent approaches deriving from world-systems, gender studies, post-colonial studies, game theory, and network theory are then applied to case studies that include the emergence of a Mesopotamian state ca. 3400 BC, the Akkadian and Ur III empires, Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian trade, pharaonic Egypt, the international Late Bronze Age world, Aegean palatial civilization, and the Phoenicians. Students are welcome to present and write on other topics also. Monroe will provide context and clarification to assist with the specialist literature, but prior coursework in ancient studies will be advantageous in critically evaluating and writing about all the course readings.

Full details for ARKEO 4670 - Wealth and Power: Political Economy in Ancient Near Eastern States

Independent work under the close guidance of a faculty member.

Full details for ARKEO 4981 - Honors Thesis Research

The student, under faculty direction, will prepare a senior thesis.

Full details for ARKEO 4982 - Honors Thesis Write-Up

Graduate students pursue advanced topics of particular interest under the guidance of faculty member(s).

Full details for ARKEO 6000 - Graduate Independent Study in Archaeology

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

Full details for ARKEO 6040 - Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

This course engages students in Archaeology and related fields in a semester-long discussion of the craft of archaeology with the faculty of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. Each week, a different faculty member will moderate a conversation on the professional skills vital to the modern practice of archaeological research and the tools key to professionalization. Seminar topics include developing a research project and working with museum collections to matters of pedagogy and career development.

Full details for ARKEO 6100 - The Craft of Archaeology

Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains from archaeological sites. Like forensic scientists at the scene of the crime, bioarchaeologists search for clues embedded in human bone and mummified tissues to reconstruct how ancient peoples lived and died. As a dynamic living system, the human skeleton responds not only to hormones that govern human development but also to physiological stress brought on by disease, malnutrition, and trauma. The human body is also an artifact molded by cultural understandings of gender, prestige, self-expression, and violence. In this course, students will learn the scientific techniques for estimating skeletal age and sex, diagnosing pathology, and reconstructing diet and migration patterns. This course emphasizes the critical integration of biological and cultural evidence for understanding past individuals and societies.

Full details for ARKEO 6235 - Bioarchaeology

This course provides a long-term overview of the indigenous peoples of Cornell's home region and their neighbors from an archaeological perspective.  Cornell students live and work in the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations Iroquois, and this class will help residents to understand the deep history of this place. We will examine long-term changes in material culture, settlement, subsistence, and trade; the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; indigenous responses to European and American colonization; the practicalities of doing indigenous-site archaeology in New York State; and contemporary indigenous perspectives on archaeology. Visits to local archaeological sites and museum collections will supplement classroom instruction.

Full details for ARKEO 6248 - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast

This course offers a global survey of the archaeology of social inequality that demonstrates the historical and geographical range in forms of enslavement, captivity, and exploitative labor. Is there a universal definition of "slavery"? How did human exploitation vary through space and time? How does the archaeological record help us to understand the strategies did people use to survive? What are the legacies of slavery today? We will explore these questions by studying archaeological material culture and landscapes, bringing to the foreground the everyday lives and agency of such men, women, and children. Throughout the course we will consider the current politics of heritage, concerns of descendant communities, issues of citizenship, and engaging the public in the archaeology of slavery and indenture.

Full details for ARKEO 7005 - Archaeology of Slavery and Indenture

This course examines the discursive relationship between science and archaeology, including the painful legacy of racialized pseudo-sciences—something that has recently been reinvigorated by new methodologies like aDNA. We will focus on research design, exploring how new scientific methods have offered both the "smoking gun" necessary to resolve thorny, decades-old archaeological questions as well as the "smoke and mirrors" wherein myopia and poorly-suited analytical techniques have provided a veneer of respectability to dubious studies. Consequently, major themes of the course will include reproducibility, error, the importance of publishing inconclusive data, and methods selection for testing archaeological hypotheses. Upon completing the course, students will have developed a strong theoretical and methodological literacy for science applications in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 7025 - Smoking Guns or Smoke and Mirrors? Science and Archaeology

This class examines the history and holdings of Cornell's teaching collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects. Designed to start a systematic inventory of the collections, it requires hands-on engagement with the objects (defining their material, age, function etc.) as much as archival work. Questions concerning the ethics of collections and calls for "decolonizing" museums will play a central role as we ultimately think about how to make use of and display the objects in our custody.

Full details for ARKEO 7035 - Cornell's Collection of Greek and Roman Art

This seminar immerses students in the diverse painting traditions of colonial Latin America (1500s-1800s), with a focus on artistic practice in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and the Hispanophone Caribbean. Themes include the pluralism and material makeup of devotional images, aesthetic constructions of race and class, the development of artistic workshops, and the role of rebellion and revolution in art. Students will participate in the curatorial development of Cornell's first exhibition of colonial Latin American art, scheduled to open in June 2024. They will research the paintings selected for the exhibition; devise the installation layout and design; write wall texts; and collaborate on the development of educational programming. Activities will also include a field trip to Buffalo State University observe scientific analysis of select paintings from the exhibition.

Full details for ARKEO 7166 - Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas

Critical approaches to embodiment compel bioarchaeologists to consider how social norms and institutional inequalities are enacted and materialized through the body. This course contributes a deep archaeological perspective on the lived experience of inequality and the historically contingent nature of sexuality, gender, and violence. Drawing upon the study of human skeletons, social theory, and a rich comparative literature in cultural anthropology, we will theorize bones as once-living bodies and explore topics such as body modification and mutilation, masculinity and performative violence, gender and sexual fluidity, and sickness and suffering in past societies. We will not only consider privilege and marginalization in lived experience, but also in death, examining how unequal social relationships are reproduced when the dead body is colonized as an object of study.

Full details for ARKEO 7227 - Embodiment of Inequality: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

Ethnographic and archaeological objects are widely collected, by individuals and by institutions. This course will explore the history and processes of museums and collecting, and issues around working with collections. We will work with materials in the Anthropology Collections, and also draw on other resources on campus and in the area to experience a variety of ways that museums and collections are organized, maintained, conceptualized and presented. We also will consider challenges to collecting, such as its implication in nationalist and imperialist agendas, the problems of archaeological looting and ethnographic appropriation, and indigenous expectations and demands for inclusion in such activities.

Full details for ARKEO 7240 - Collecting Culture: Museums and Anthropology

This advanced seminar focuses on the archaeological study of houses, households, families, and communities. How is the study of domestic life transforming our understanding of ancient societies? How can we most effectively use material evidence to investigate the practices, experiences, identities, and social dynamics that made up the everyday lives of real people in antiquity, non-elite as well as elite? To address these questions, we will survey and critically examine historical and current theories, methods, and approaches within the field of household archaeology. This course is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates with some previous background in archaeology, material culture studies, or related fields.

Full details for ARKEO 7257 - The Archaeology of Houses and Households

This course follows from last semester's Zooarchaeological Method.  We will shift our emphasis here from basic skills to interpretation, although you will continue to work with archaeological bones.  We will begin by examining topics surrounding the basic interpretation of raw faunal data: sampling, quantification, taphonomy, seasonality.  We will then explore how to use faunal data to reconstruct subsistence patterns, social structure, and human-animal relations.

Full details for ARKEO 7264 - Zooarchaeological Interpretation

Students, working individually with faculty member(s), prepare a master's thesis in archaeology.

Full details for ARKEO 8902 - Master's Thesis