ARCHY 469 – Theory in Archaeology Lecture: TTh 1:30 – 3:20pm, SMI 307 Instructor: Debora C. Trein Instructor’s office: DEN 133 Office Hours: F 11:30 – 1:30pm, or by appointment Email:
[email protected] Source: unknown artist Course Description: How do we go from artifacts to statements about the lives of people in the past? How much of the past can we truly know, when most of the pertinent evidence has long since degraded, and when the people we aim to study are long dead? This course provides a broad survey of the major theoretical trends that have shaped anthropological archaeology over time. We will outline and examine some of the major publications, debates, and shifts in archaeological thought that have influenced the diverse ways in which we claim to know what we know about the past. In this course, we will explore the notion that the various intellectual approaches we employ to make statements about the past are influenced by the different perspectives we have of the relationship between the past and the present, the kinds of meaning we believe can be derived from the archaeological record, the questions we seek to answer, and the methods we use to retrieve (and prioritize) information. This course will start with a broad overview of the major periods of theoretical development in archaeology from the 1800s to the present, followed by discussions of how archaeologists tackle common archaeological questions through diverse theoretical lenses (and why sometimes they don’t tackle these questions at all). While the politics of archaeological practice will be 1 | Page touched upon throughout the course, we will devote the last quarter of the course to the repercussions of archaeological practice to present-day communities and stakeholders.