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Below are course titles that can lead you to basic course descriptions provided further down the page or the to actual course website Undergraduate Courses
Graduate Courses
Undergraduate Courses Anthropology 107: Introduction to Archaeology (Course Website) Anthropology G230: Intermediate Seminar - Archaeological Myth and Mystery Anthropology 334: Ancient North America (Course Website) Anthropology 341: Archaeological Method and Theory (Course Website) Anthropology 425: Contemporary Issues in Anthropology (Course Website) Anthropology 485: Field Research in Archaeology (2008 Application not available) Honors 290: Dirty Histories, Popular Pasts, and Present Politics (Course Website) Graduate Courses Anthropology 630: Seminar in the Prehistory of the Americas (Course Website) Anthropology 640: Archaeological Methods and Analysis (Course Website) Anthropology 665: Graduate Seminar in Archaeology (Course Website) Anthropology 672: Culture Contact and Colonialism in the Americas
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An Intermediate Seminar in the UMass Boston General Education curriculum focused on critically exploring the myths, mysteries, frauds, and fantasies surrounding archaeology. Topics include sunken continents, aliens, presumed early visits to the Americas, archaeoastronomy, psychic methods, and New Age religion. The goal is to examine diverse claims about the past, good and bad uses of archaeological evidence, and the persistence of popular misconceptions about archaeology and history. As an Intermediate Seminar, the course is focused primarily on critical reading, critical writing, and group learning exercises.
This course is an archaeological survey of ancient North America, from Paleoindian times over 14,000 years ago to contact with Europeans. Topics include subsistence, adaptation, mobility, migration, trade, settlement patterns, material culture, ideology, social inequality, and gender in Native North America using archaeological case studies from several regions such as the Plains, Arctic, California, Northwest Coast, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast. The course outline follows this regional categorization, but lectures, assignments, and discussions center on key issues in archaeology more broadly.
A combined lecture and laboratory course that introduces the techniques and analytical approaches used in contemporary archaeology. We begin the course with a consideration of archaeology's history, theories, and methods over the 20th century. Following this, the course concentrates on procedures used to collect and process material remains from archaeological sites. Subsequently, our emphasis will shift to interpretive models advanced by archaeologists to understand the nature of past societies and the dynamics of long-term social change. The course emphasizes both quantitative and qualitative data while promoting an analytical perspective on interpreting the past. We also explore current theoretical and ethical debates surrounding the relationship between archaeology and its sociopolitical context.
My version of the capstone course in the major is entitled "Producing the Past in the Present." The course focuses on critical anthropological analyses of how the past is produced in the present as history, memory, commemoration, identity, justification, and contestation. The class is not as much about questioning the ability of anthropologists and others to tell "good" and real histories as it is about emphasizing the practices -- cultural and political -- that surround the business of heritage and history. We need to understand the processes of remembering, forgetting, and even fabricating "pasts" as individuals, collectivities, academics, and nation-states make and narrate history. To achieve this, the course focuses on issues such as nationalism, heritage, repatriation, collecting, looting, and preservation through such topics as the Baghdad Museum and Iraq War, the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles, the Holocaust, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, Colonial Williamsburg, and Israeli archaeology.
The course is an archaeological field school held in the summer. My version of this course currently involves collaborating with the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation to conduct intensive surveys of tribal lands to identify and document archaeological sites dating from several thousand years ago to the recent colonial period. The primary focus is on archaeological sites dating to the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in an effort to study indigenous responses to colonialism. Alongside tribal interns, field school students receive training in archaeological techniques such as map-making, pedestrian surveying, shovel testing, excavation, and material culture identification. The field school offers a unique opportunity for students to work closely with Native Americans on a common goal of understanding indigenous histories on traditional lands.
Histories are always dirty – lying below ground and stored in dusty archives, but also messy in interpretation and subject to manipulation behind closed doors and in public view. Whether sought by anthropologists and historians in academic pursuits, referred to by judges and presidents for justification, consumed as entertainment, summoned in religion and politics, traced as genealogy, or protected in its material and mythical form by nation-states, the past – both real or imagined – plays a critical role in the present. Using archaeology, cultural anthropology, history, Native American studies, and museum studies, this multidisciplinary Honors course considers the politics of forgetting and remembering and the struggle to control the past. We will consider themes such as historical commemoration, repatriation, nationalism, social justice, restitution, re-enactments, war and conflict, antiquities trade, looting, and legislation. No anthropology or archaeology background is required.
Anthropology 530 is a two-part course that couples the undergraduate offering of Anthropology 334 with an additional one-hour discussion period attended only by graduate students. The course is an archaeological survey of ancient North America, from Paleoindian times over 12,000 years ago to contact with Europeans. Topics include subsistence, adaptation, mobility, migration, trade, settlement patterns, material culture, ideology, social inequality, and gender in Native North America using archaeological case studies from several regions such as the Plains, Arctic, California, Northwest Coast, Southwest, Midwest, Southeast, and Northeast. The course outline follows this regional categorization, but lectures, assignments, and discussions center on key issues in archaeology more broadly. Graduate students attend the lecture, participate in ways that enrich both undergraduate and graduate student experiences, do extra readings for seminar discussion, and actively discuss issues for the seminar hour.
This course introduces the practice of historical archaeology in the laboratory and field through considerations of research design, methodology, material culture, and technical analyses of archaeological remains. The first segment involves discussions and readings on research design, field methodology, and recovery. The remaining segments cover material culture and technical analyses in the laboratory with a focus on ceramics, metal, glass, stone, plant remains, animal remains, and conservation techniques. The latter component of the course is devoted to hands-on, practical training in laboratory techniques and material identification.
The course introduces students to the history of archaeology and the diverse theoretical forms that the discipline takes today. Beginning with an overview of the origins of archaeology, the course leads students through the three schools of archaeological thought known as culture historical, processual, and post-processual archaeology. In this context, the face of contemporary archaeology is a diverse one that includes many approaches focused on social agency, evolution, ecology, critical theory, gender, narrative, and cognition. We will pay particular attention to the epistemology - the how we know what we know - behind these approaches. At the same time, the course will focus on the theoretical debates that have structured the growth and focus of archaeology. Historical archaeology is a relatively new addition to archaeology's history, and we will discuss its various roles in the broader discipline.
This course explores the multifaceted nature of colonial encounters between Europeans and indigenous people. Using the Americas as the geographical focus, the course devotes special attention to the analytical and theoretical discourse shaping anthropological approaches to colonialism through the topics of material culture, gender, ideology, ethnicity, race, identity, labor, class, and resistance. Readings and discussions will draw on data and perspectives from ethnohistory, historical archaeology, and cultural anthropology to tackle the simultaneously global and local nature of colonialism.
(2008 Application not available)
Department of Anthropology Office: 617-287-6854 |