Sherds for Nerds: Pottery in Archaeology

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course focuses on archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections and studies to explore how people make, use, discard, and understand ceramic objects in their lives. Ceramics offer tactile and material expressions of culture, and signify and embody complex intersectional ideas about what it means to be human. Through hands-on projects with archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections from ND professors’ research projects, students will engage in experiential learning about gender, race, class, sexuality, political power structures, and identity. All peoples’ identities are grounded in intersectional axes of difference, and ceramics offer a tangible tool for exploring how people use material culture and technology to be themselves, interact with others, and build personhood in the past and present. Because ceramic remains are abundant in many archaeological sites, the study of pottery has a long history in archaeology. Analysis and interpretation of ceramics allows archaeologists to accomplish varied ends: to establish a time scale, to document interconnections between different areas, sites, or groups of people, and to suggest what activities were carried out at particular sites. How archaeologists study the connection between ceramics and people, today and in the past, is the focus of this course, and we will be using contemporary, prehistoric and historic archaeological collections from Jordan, Ghana, and the United States to enable students to explore the linkage between people and their ceramic material culture.