An Introduction to Archaeology

Have you ever found yourself, perhaps after visiting a museum, an art gallery, or a historic site, wanting to know more about a long-lost civilization, a fortress that was bitterly fought over ages ago, or a ruined city sitting mute but poignant in the midst of what was once a thriving human world but is now a trackless jungle or a lonely plain?

If such experiences have gripped your imagination, then you have probably also wondered how, more generally, groups of human beings dealt at different times and places with the challenges of their environments, and how, in turn, the environment shaped past peoples across the unchronicled millennia of human prehistory.

Writing was invented only about 5,000 years ago. Since scientists can trace humanity's origins back 500 times as far?to almost 2.5 million years ago?sometimes the desire to explore questions like these cannot be satisfied by the pages of written history. The place for you to turn, as this course will show, is to archaeology.

Part meticulous empirical science and part inspired detective work, archaeology seeks answers about the obscure reaches of the past by using techniques and insights from a wealth of other fields, including geology, anthropology, history, physics, art history, and even philosophy?along with long hours in the field studying the physical traces that our forebears have left behind.

Course Lecture Titles

1- What is Archaeology?
2- The Scientific Underpinnings
3- Historians, Treasure Hunters, and Antiquarians
4- The Fathers of Scientific Excavation
5- Preservation of Archaeological Remains
6- Stratigraphic and Sequence Dating
7- Seriation, Ancient Sources, and Sediments
8- Dating Using Flora and Fauna
9- Radiocarbon and Potassium-Argon Dating
10- Other Scientific Dating Methods
11- Archaeological Survey
12- Excavation
13- Interpreting Finds
14- Stone Tools
15- Pottery
16- Bones
17- Features and Structures
18- Reconstructing Ancient Cultures
19- Archaeological Theories about Change
20- Paleolithic Art
21- The Neolithic Revolution
22- Catal Huyuk
23- The Rise of Civilizations
24- Archaeology and Ethics