21303. Modern Readings in Anthropology: Making the Natural World (The Anthropology of Ecology). In this course we not only consider the conceptual underpinnings of contemporary Western notions of ecology, environment, and balance, but also examine several specific historical trajectories of anthropogenic landscape change. We approach these issues from the vantage of several different disciplinary traditions including environmental history, ecological anthropology, and paleoecology.

259/394. South Asia Before the Buddha (=SoAsia 2xx) This is a study of the archaeology of South Asia that covers the period from the beginning of the Holocene (ca. 10,000 years ago) to the Early Historic (to cs. A.D. 500) or the time of Early Buddhism. Over much of this period, archaeological data constitute the only source of information about the past; for all of this period archaeology can inform on those people and aspects of the past that are largely ignored in documentary sources. We discuss the multiple transitions to agriculture across the subcontinent, the development and disappearance of urbanism in the Indus Valley, the establishment of the first empires, and the shifting mosaic of cultural and economic practices that constitutes early South Asia..

262(462) [21401]. Logic and Practice of Archaeology. This course offers an overview of the concepts and practice of anthropological archaeology. We discuss the varied goals of archaeological research and consider the range of ways in which archaeologists build inferences about the past from the material record. Throughout the quarter, the more general discussion of research logic and practice is situated in the context of detailed consideration of current archaeological projects from different parts of the world.

26505/46505. Non-Industrial Agriculture. Agriculture is, fundamentally, a human manipulation of the environment, a deliberately maintained sucessional state designed to serve human needs and desires. In this course, we use the history of non-industrial agriculture to think through some contemporary concerns about environmental change and the sources of our food – including topics such as genetically modified plants, fertilizers, sustainability, and invasive species. Beginning with the origins of agriculture in the early Holocene, we examine several forms of so-called “traditional” agriculture in the tropics and elsewhere, from swidden to intensive cropping. While the course is framed in terms of contemporary concerns, our focus is primarily historical and ethnographic, focusing on the experiences of agriculturalists over the last ten thousand years, including non-industrial farmers today. Students will be expected to produce and present a research paper.

28500/48200. Political Ecology. Is political ecology the politics of nature? An ecology of humans? Environmental history? An end to nature-culture divides? A new way of seeing or a recasting of old debates? In this course we consider these and other claims and counter-claims, with a particular focus on historical political ecology. Our chief concern, however, will be not what this large and diverse field claims to be but what it actually does and potentially could do. A major part of the course will be devoted to extended case studies; students are expected to write a research paper and make several in-class presentations.

28700/48300. The State in India (=ANST 26300, SALC 28700). From the “classics” of the social sciences to contemporary public policy, ideas about South Asian states have often helped shape scholarly and popular understandings about the origins, roles, and forms of state power more generally. Indian states have played a role in discussions as diverse as those about “primary state origins” to notions such as “oriental despotism,” “the segmentary state,” “feudalism,” and “patrimonial states,” among others. We will examine some of these concepts in the context of a nonsystematic survey of precolonial South Asia , looking at the degree to which classic and contemporary views of state origins, operation, and definition help us to understand actual historical and archaeological information. The course will range widely from the Harappan Civilization of the third millennium BCE to the seventeenth century CE and will combine information and approaches from both archaeology and history. The course will be divided between lecture and discussion; no prior knowledge of South Asia is presumed. Students will be required to write a substantive research paper and present their conclusion in class. 

29100/39100. Archaeobotanical Analysis. This class introduces the theory, method, and technique of a range of archaeobotanical analyses. We will discuss field methods in archaeobotany, sampling, presentation and interpretation of data, and specific applications such as crop processing studies, vegetation reconstruction, and fire history. Both a lecture and a lab course, students will combine written work with lab exercises in macrobotanical (seeds, wood) and microbotanical (pollen, charcoal) analysis.

36900. Commerce and Culture: Indian Ocean Trade. The Indian Ocean has been host to extensive networks of exchange and cultural interaction for at least the last 2000 years. These far-flung connections both grew out of and partly transformed local societies and economies; we thus need to address these networks of 'commerce and culture' in order to understand such processes as urbanism, the emergence of money, markets, and commercial production and the development and expansion of structures of state power and their interpenetration with local and regional economies. In this course we focus primarily on the South Asian subcontinent, but will also consider to some extent its relationships with the Mediterranean, East Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and island Southeast Asia. We will follow several strands of economic and social/political change from the period of the 'second urbanization' of the Early Historic (c. 500 BC-AD 500) up to the sixteenth century AD. Although much of the source material is historical, we will place special emphasis on archaeological data and its integration/opposition with other sources of information. Students should be willing both to work across disciplines in bringing together perspectives and information and to tackle primary archaeological reports.

39001, 39002. Theory and Method in Archaeology [200 units]. PQ: Required for first-year graduate students in archaeology; open to undergraduates only with consent of instructors; this course carries 200 units of credit. In this course, we will critically examine the role of method and theory in the development of contemporary archaeology. Theory both provides a conceptual framework for inquiry and informs the means by which we use our data to make inferences about the past. The forms this theory takes and the ways in which theory guides method are the subject of this course. Discussion will be organized around the historical development of theoretical positions and specific examples of research that have exemplified or challenged existing theoretical and methodological standards.

56100. Anthropology, Power, and "the Primitive": Foragers in History.  This course examines the history of groups living at the economic and political margins of complex political economies and the construction of that history in terms of archaeological and anthropological systematics. We ask how such people come to be marginalized, and what roles they may play in the structure and logic of larger societies. In this quarter we will focus on a particular debate -- that regarding the 'status' of tropical peoples who hunt, gather, and trade, among other things. We will discuss the hunter-gatherer 'revisionist' debate and arguments about 'refugee' groups, focusing not on their context in hunter-gatherer studies, but on how these debates may lead to a fuller understanding of processes of power and inequality in regional polities. This large literature is ethnographic, historical, and archaeological. The course is structured as a seminar; students will have significant responsibility for integration and discussion of particular historical cases.

56300. Seminar: Archaeology of Empires. In this seminar we will be concerned with conceptions of expansive polities, with their dynamics, variety, operation, structure, and with the consequences for those incorporated into or otherwise affected by preindustrial empires. We focus on the materiality of empires as it is manifest in architecture, art, and other archaeological remains, but our perspective is necessarily broadly anthropological and historical. We consider both “ancient” and “Early Modern” empires (and examine the ways in which such a distinction has been constructed) and explore whether or not processual and comparative understandings of imperialism and colonialism are possible.

56400. The Intensification of Production. In this course we examine the theoretical literature surrounding the concept of the intensification of production, and critically evaluate both the conceptual underpinnings of the concept and its use in anthropology, as well as it applications and analytic utility. In archaeology, the process of intensification has come to be closely linked with a range of issues from subsistence change to the development of 'complexity,' and has been linked to a variety of supposed causal mechanisms including demographic growth, elite coercion, risk reduction, and engagement with markets. We will examine but also attempt to move beyond this literature to consider intensification as an historical process.

56800. Seminar: Power, Gender, Archaeology. PQ: Consent of instructor. What can archaeologists learn about power and gender in the past? How do we frame our inquiries and how do we (how should we) go about addressing them? Although we discuss the conceptual parameters of power and, in a more limited way, of gender and review their treatment in the archaeological literature, in this class we focus specifically on method, critically assessing archaeological conventions and systematics, and evaluating the potential for new approaches.

58800.  Pollen Analysis.

58801.  Advanced Pollen Analysis.