3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This archaeology course will provide an overview of technological developments in the ancient world (from the Neolithic period to the beginning of the first millennium CE) and will explore their effects on the organization of economies and societies. Each week we will discuss a technological innovation and assess its impact on the societies that introduced it. This course will focus primarily on developments and case studies from the ancient Near Eastern and eastern Africa. We will depart from this trajectory to engage in relevant comparisons with developments occurring in other areas of the ancient world. Throughout the course, social aspects of technologies will be explored alongside economic aspects. In addition to focusing on the development of technologies as ‘objects’ (stone tools, pottery, metals, etc.), we will study non-material technologies, that arose as solutions to practical problems and have altered the world in important ways (agriculture, animal domestication, writing, etc.). This course approaches past technologies from a number of different perspectives: (1) by learning about particular anthropological and archaeological case studies, (2) by engaging with scholarship focusing on major theoretical and philosophical themes, (3) by engaging with ethnographic research, both in the form of articles and in the form of documentaries, and (4) by means of thought experiments and debates. This course will benefit humanities, social science, and science-oriented students who have an interest in understanding the inner-workings of two important aspects of human societies: technology and economy