Introduction to Archaeology

Archaeology isn't really about digging up treasure — it's about reconstructing how past societies lived from fragmentary material evidence, and this course is your introduction to how that reasoning actually works. You'll move through the discipline's history, the logic behind survey and excavation, the dating methods (relative, radiometric, archaeometric) that anchor everything in time, and the analytical techniques used to read diet, technology, trade, and even cognition from stones and sherds, with quizzes, two reports, and a midterm/final keeping you accountable. As the Year 1 foundation for the HART major, it sets up the methodological vocabulary every later field school, period course, and theory seminar will assume you already speak.