Issues in Pre-Classical Art and Archaeology

A graduate seminar that treats Anatolian material culture from the Palaeolithic through the Iron Age as a way into bigger theoretical questions: how identity, gender, social inequality, and power get read off objects and burials, and how present-day politics keeps reinterpreting the past. You'll lead eight seminar reports on assigned readings, write a midterm and final essay, and produce a research paper, so most of the work is bibliographical digging and arguing your reading in front of the room. It's the methodological backbone for later fieldwork and thesis work in the department, less about memorizing sites than learning to be skeptical of the frameworks archaeologists use to talk about people.