Skip to Content
Home » Courses » Anthropology and Archaeology

Anthropology and Archaeology

Courselist

ANTH E-1000 Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological History of Ancient Egypt
Fall term (13766)
Peter Der Manuelian, PhD, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $1,025, undergraduate credit $1,025, graduate credit $1,950.
Online only, beginning Sept. 1. Required sections to be arranged. Limited enrollment. Lecture 1 video.
Website Printable version
This course is a survey of ancient Egyptian pharaonic civilization. It emphasizes Egyptian material culture: pyramids, temples, tombs, settlements and cities, art masterpieces, and objects of daily life. The course explores major development themes that defined the Egyptian state: the geographical landscape, kingship, social stratification, craftsmanship, and religion, including mortuary beliefs. Our chronological path includes excursions into Egyptian art, history, politics, religion, literature (hieroglyphs), and the evolution of modern Egyptology. The course also touches on contemporary issues of object repatriation, and archaeology and cultural nationalism. Local students may participate in field trips to the Egyptian collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, along with immersive 3-D computer model viewing of the Giza Pyramids in Harvard's Visualization Center. Lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Societies of the World 38. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1050 Moctezuma's Mexico: Then and Now
Fall term (13786)
William L. Fash, PhD, Charles P. Bowditch Professor of Central American and Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Davíd Carrasco, PhD, Neil L. Rudenstine Professor for the Study of Latin America, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $1,025, undergraduate credit $1,025, graduate credit $1,950.
Online only, beginning Sept. 2. Optional sections to be arranged. Lecture 1 video.
Website Printable version
This course explores the origins, glory days, and collapse of the Aztec Empire and other key Mesoamerican civilizations followed by the political and sexual interactions of the Great Encounter between Mesoamerica and Europe. Focus is on archaeology, cosmovision, human sacrifice, divine kingship, and rebellion in Mesoamerican cities and in colonialism. Hands-on work with objects at the Peabody Museum aid in examining new concepts of race, nation, and the persistence of Moctezuma's Mexico in Latino identities in the Mexico-US borderlands. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Societies of the World 30. Formerly ANTH E-175. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1070 The Incas: The Last Great Empire of Pre-Columbian South America
Fall term (13767)
Gary Urton, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies, Harvard University.
Mondays beginning Aug. 29, 7:35-9:35 pm. Optional sections to be arranged.
Course tuition: noncredit $650, undergraduate credit $975, graduate credit $1,900.
Website Printable version
This course provides an in-depth look at the civilization of the Incas of Andean South America from the time of their emergence as a state until their defeat by Francisco Pizarro and his troops in 1532. Formerly ANTH E-174. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1075 Anthropology of Art
Spring term, Section 1 (23706)
Gary Urton, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies, Harvard University.
Wednesdays beginning Jan. 25, 5:30-7:30 pm.
Course tuition: graduate credit $1,900.
Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.
Website Printable version
Spring term, Section 2 (23736)
Gary Urton, PhD, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies, Harvard University.
Wednesdays beginning Jan. 25, 7:35-9:35 pm.
Course tuition: graduate credit $1,900.
Graduate seminar. Limited enrollment.
Website Printable version
Irridescent feather headdresses, ancient textiles with images of human-feline figures, and ceramic vessels adorned with glyphs and kingly figures: what did such objects—which we now refer to as "primitive art"—mean to the people who made them? What technological capabilities and skills were involved in their production? How can we today develop an understanding and an appreciation of the meaning and significance of objects that were precious to people around the world, past and present? What can an object that was made and venerated by people in a society tell us about the cosmology, or worldview, of its makers? And finally, what can we say not just about what objects mean and meant to people, but how objects themselves have agency in society (a presumption that goes today under the name of "materiality")? This seminar leads students on an exploration of these and other questions concerning the production and meaning of objects primarily in ancient cultures and in present-day non-Western societies. Each class period is devoted to the study of a particular object or group of objects from a different society. Whenever possible, we make use of the remarkable collection of objects in Harvard's Peabody Museum. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1179 Historical Linguistics, Ancient Inscriptions, and Archaeology
Spring term (23644)
Marc Zender, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Tulane University.
Course tuition: noncredit $1,025, undergraduate credit $1,025, graduate credit $1,950.
Online only, beginning Jan. 23. Required online sections to be arranged. Lecture 1 video.
Website Printable version
All languages change. For more than two hundred years, linguists have documented the similar ways in which sounds, grammar, and even word-meanings are prone to shift in the world's languages. This course takes a hands-on approach to historical linguistics, where students reconstruct ancient languages through the detailed comparison of their modern descendants. We also examine the crucial confirmation which ancient inscriptions and other archaeological evidence can provide linguists working on languages with lengthy written traditions. The recorded lectures are from the 2009 course ANTH E-179. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1300 Human Evolution
Fall term (13801)
Russell Greaves, PhD, Lecturer on Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Tuesdays beginning Aug. 30, 5:30-7:30 pm. Two required laboratories to be arranged.
Course tuition: noncredit $650, undergraduate credit $975, graduate credit $1,900.
Syllabus Printable version
This course examines the fossil, genetic, and archaeological record of human evolution, providing a comprehensive survey of our biological and behavioral changes from early australopithecines to the emergence of modern humans. In order to understand the unique aspects of human success, there is a rich comparative field of work across several disciplines within human evolutionary biology that looks at how evolution has shaped our particular physical and mental capabilities. Important topics to be covered include hominin interactions with changing environments, bipedality, increased brain size, tool use, social behavior, other physical and behavioral adaptations, and the geographic expansions of hominins out of Africa. The course provides a fundamental understanding of evolutionary theory and its relevance for studying the human past. The course briefly addresses the earlier developments in primate evolution before the appearance of lineages directly ancestral to humans. The majority of the course examines the emergence, biological changes, and adaptations of the australopithecines and the genus Homo over the last 4 million years. Human evolution not only addresses where our species came from in the past. It helps us understand how evolution has shaped the organisms we are now, negotiating rapid environmental, dietary, health, and behavioral changes that are novel challenges to the conditions our bodies and brains developed to confront. Formerly ANTH E-162. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1615 The Anthropology of Arabia
Fall term (13714)
Steven C. Caton, PhD, Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies, Harvard University.
Course tuition: noncredit $1,025, undergraduate credit $1,025, graduate credit $1,950.
Online only, beginning Sept. 2. Required sections to be arranged. Lecture 1 video.
Website Printable version
This course focuses on the Arabian Peninsula in the twentieth century—Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Oman, and Yemen. It addresses tribal organization and its continuing importance, gender relations, varieties of Islam and their influence, and old and new forms of urbanism. Primary readings are all ethnographic. The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Societies of the World 46. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1660 Anthropology and Human Rights
Spring term (23622)
Theodore Macdonald, Jr., PhD, Teaching Assistant in Social Studies, Harvard University.
Wednesdays beginning Jan. 25, 7:35-9:35 pm. Required sections Wednesdays, 6:30-7:30 pm.
Course tuition: noncredit $650, undergraduate credit $975, graduate credit $1,900.
Website Printable version
This course combines an introduction to the formal, theoretical, and normative structures of human rights with analyses of contemporary case studies. It illustrates several critical human rights issues, debates, and practices that demonstrate the increasing significance of ethnographic field methods and related interpretive analysis. Accepting that agreement on and realization of human rights often require negotiation and compromise, the course illustrates why, and suggests how, realization of many broadly-defined human rights requires specific contextualization. Formerly ANTH E-169. (4 credits)
ANTH E-1700/W Race in the Americas
Spring term (23623)
James P. Herron, PhD, Preceptor in Expository Writing, Harvard University.
Tuesdays beginning Jan. 24, 5:30-7:30 pm.
Course tuition: noncredit $650, undergraduate credit $975, graduate credit $1,900.
Writing-intensive course.
Website Printable version
In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote prophetically that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." More recently, anthropologists and historians have argued that the very idea of race—the notion that human beings can be exhaustively divided into enduring groups such as whites, blacks, or Indians—was first invented in the New World, in the Americas. But what are races? Does it mean the same thing to be white in Boston as it does in Bogotá? If blackness in Alabama is rooted in assumptions about essential biological nature, does the same go for Rio de Janeiro? Is race simply an illusion, a convenient mask for political domination and economic exploitation? Can we hope to abolish the concept of race altogether, or is its grip too tenacious, its appeal to the psyche too great? This course considers episodes in the development of racial categories in Latin and North America. Our aim is to arrive at an overall sense of the nature of race in social life by comparing the logic of racial practices at different times and places in the hemisphere. Formerly ANTH E-170. (4 credits)

Browse courses by subject