Topics in Archaeology: Archaeology of the Living World

3 units

As anthropologists, archaeologists are familiar with the animate nature of reality as experienced by most people at most times in human history. Guided by such reality, people create material patterns that challenge archaeologists to identify them by attempting to elucidate what the makers might have experienced and intended, not what modern scientists might see through the lens of a clear division between animate and inanimate material. Increasingly, the default position of ignoring this challenge because it is difficult to make convincing arguments regarding the esoteric knowledge generating patterns in an animate world is no longer acceptable, morally or practically. This course explores some of the work archaeologists are undertaking to advance knowledge of past realities experienced by people generating material records we that can study from the perspective of relations between people and things of a mutually constitutive nature.