Course Introduction: The Origins of Human Society
This course looks at the development of human culture and society across
the last 7 million years of time. Students will come to appreciate how
archaeologists use material culture to reconstruct the major events
leading to the development of modern humans and contemporary patterns of
human life, including the first human use of tools, the origins of
language and art, and the invention of agriculture. During the first part
of the course emphasis will be placed on the history, methods and theories
used in archaeological research. The second section of the course will
focus on our earliest human ancestors, humans as hunter-gatherers and the
origins of modern human behavior. The course will draw on case studies
from between 7 million and 12,000 years ago, and look at such issues as:
where early humans came from, when behavior such as meat-eating and food
sharing started, why humans developed large brains, and how they came to
spread over the globe. The final part of the course focuses on the way
humans manipulated plants and animals, what the consequences of
agriculture were for human societies, and the contexts in which cities and
complex societies developed. Since the focus of this course is on the
time before written records (i.e., human prehistory), the course will
provide an understanding of the nature of the archaeological record and
the diversity of contemporary methods archaeologists use to bring it to
life. Because of the great amount of material relating to world
prehistory and the limited amount of time available during the semester,
the course coverage will be selective, not exhaustive.
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