The School of Mind & Society · the social sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
The human species examined whole — fossils, artifacts, languages, and living cultures together.
Fieldwork among the living: kinship, ritual, exchange, and the discipline of taking strangers seriously.
Syllabus · 4 units · ~26 hours
Unit I — The Anthropological Stance
Ethnocentrism and cultural relativism · Participant observation · The ethnography as a document
Unit II — Organizing Life
Kinship and descent · Economies of reciprocity, redistribution, and markets · Political order without states
Unit III — Meaning
Ritual and religion · Symbols and taboo · Language in social life
Unit IV — The Contemporary World
Colonial legacies in the discipline · Globalization and local worlds · Applied anthropology
Fossils, genes, and stone tools: the seven-million-year record of becoming human.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~24 hours
Unit I — Reading Deep Time
Dating methods · What makes a hominin · Bipedalism comes first
Unit II — The Fossil Cast
The australopithecines · Early Homo and the first stone tools · Neanderthals and Denisovans
Unit III — Becoming Sapiens
African origins and global dispersals · Ancient DNA and what it rewrote · Language, art, and behavioral modernity
Trowel, grid, and stratigraphy: how a hole in the ground becomes evidence.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~30 hours
Unit I — Before the Dig
Survey and remote sensing · Research design and permissions · Stratigraphy: reading the layers
Unit II — Excavation
Grids, contexts, and recording · Artifacts, ecofacts, and features · Conservation in the field
Unit III — After the Dig
Typology and seriation · Radiocarbon and other clocks · Publication and the ethics of repatriation
How speech carries identity, power, and worldview — from dialects to endangered tongues.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~22 hours
Unit I — Language as Social Fact
Design features of human language · Dialects, registers, and prestige · The Sapir-Whorf question, taken carefully
Unit II — Talk in Interaction
Politeness and forms of address · Code-switching · Language and gender
Unit III — Languages in Peril
Documentation and revitalization · Contact languages: pidgins and creoles · Writing systems and literacy
Uruk, Mohenjo-daro, Teotihuacan: what the first cities were for, and how we know.
Syllabus · 3 units · ~18 hours
Unit I — What Is a City
Villages, towns, and the thresholds of urbanism · Agriculture, surplus, and specialists
Unit II — Four Early Urban Worlds
Mesopotamia: Uruk and the invention of writing · The Indus: cities without obvious kings · China: Erlitou to Anyang · Mesoamerica: Teotihuacan and the Maya
Unit III — Why Cities Rise and Fall
Trade, ritual, and defense · Collapse and its causes · What ruins can and cannot tell us