REL 303: Ancient Ways of Living: ExperimentalArchaeology (draft version)
______
Lynn Swartz Dodd Office: ACB 335
Spring 2015: TBA, Maymester May 16-31, 2o16 Classroom: ACB 335/330 and off campus
Office Hours: Tuesday 2-3, and by appointment Email:
______
No prior background is assumed or required. Students of all majors can succeed in this course.
Course objectives:
· Reflect on what it means to be human through
(1) close study of ways people have manipulated environments and resources in order survive and thrive through time and in diverse cultures;
(2) reflection on the wonder and awe arising from material transformations which may be understood as technologies, but which many traditions interpret as infused with spiritual properties
· Develop and demonstrate a critical understanding of the theories and methods of experimental archaeology
· Gain an appreciation of observation and experimentation as the foundations that underlie innovations of the past, present and future
· Evaluate and test diverse ways of living and consuming resources in order to formulate informed opinions on complex issues of critical importance in today's global world
· Utilize appropriate research skills for practical archaeological experimentation
· Learn to read and interpret actively and analytically, to think critically and creatively, and to write and speak persuasively through class discussions, presentations and group-designed and executed experiments.
Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred, space for mistakes, innovation would cease.---Evgeny Morozov / … even the simplest techniques of any primitive society take on the character of a system that can be analyzed, in terms of a more general system. The techniques can be seen as a group of significant choices which each society—or each period within a society's development—has been forced to make, whether they are compatible or incompatible with other choices.
---Claude Lévi-Strauss 1976:11
Short Description: By understanding the many connections between actions and things, starting with the foundations of human survival: shelter, food, warmth, community; we gain insight into human innovation, long-lived traditions, technological change, and successful adaptations to new and challenging environments. We become better prepared to understand the complex local and global systems in which we regularly participate.
This course provides students with tangible, personal, experimental encounters that support a more complex cultural understanding of the human-material-spiritual worlds that we inhabit, and an embodied experience of knowledge transfer. Students participate in material transformations that are hallmarks of human thriving and technological progress. These include manipulations of plant, animal and geological materials in order to achieve outcomes as diverse as fire, rope, monumental buildings, transportation, fuel, clothing, and succulent and storable foods alike (cheese, bread, fermentations). Students participate in pyrotechnic processes that involve highly complex material state changes that may be easily taken for granted, but which were oft considered miraculous in their time, such as fire making, ceramics, brewing, and metal smelting.
This is an active learning course that enables students – through daily hands-on activities and numerous field trips – to acquire and experience skills that humans devised in order to survive in pre-modern times. Then, most importantly, students learn to apply this knowledge to an experimental context. Archaeologists are among the scientists and humanists that discover, analyze, and interpret material remains as traces of people’s actions in the past. Experimental replications enable archaeologists to test and understand how these material remains came to be, through the process of analyzing site formation (looking at what’s left once people are done doing some activity).
Students develop their own hands-on experiments throughout the semester as a means of investigating the traces left behind by specific activities…whether butchering or baking; metal smelting or stone tool knapping…and these are documented in an in-class, reflexive process. Students personally encounter the degree of effort, planning, and labor that is required to sustain life. This enables students to gain a feel for a particular process. They then create an experiment to enact, assess, carefully document and analyze that process. Rather than simply making bread in an earthen bread oven, students might work in a group to make similar bread ovens, each with features distinctive from each other and those identified archaeologically. Students also reflect on the ways in which technologies (chemistry, metallurgy, physics) that are now well-understood, could have been interpreted (or still are interpreted) as the result of mysterious forces, even spirits or divine action. The results of each experiment will be shared publicly.
Who can benefit from this course? This course is accessible to students in any major if they:
(1) are curious about the many skills that enabled survival for thousands of years, including skills that remain valuable today in medicine, food science, mining and metallurgy, industry, agriculture, economics, business, psychology, politics, and history;
(2) seek a deep-time perspective on their own ways of being in the world;
(3) want to understand better how scientists and humanists of all kinds make sense of the material traces of the past.
Class requirements:
A student is responsible for being prepared by reading the assigned selections in advance of each class session, thinking critically and actively participating in discussions and activities. Class readings are diverse and include theoretical perspectives, broad ruminations on human-environment interactions, and studies of the materials that constitute our world (e.g. water, soil, clay, salt, plants, animals).
There is a course materials fee for this class. That fee is (approximately $100; to be determined based on class size).
Grading:
10% Participate actively in class; this is an experiential, experimentally-focused learning course. Attendance in class sessions is critical to success. Wear clothes that you do not mind ruining. In addition to normal classroom experiences, students should expect class sessions in which they may get dirty or messy, and in which strange smells will be encountered, including smoke, gases, rotting and fermenting materials, natural plant, animal, and mineral substances. Other sessions will require hammering, crushing, lifting materials, bending, getting muddy, wet, dusty; climbing over, hiking, ducking under, pulling, chopping, scraping, cutting, and measuring. Dress in clothes appropriate to the activity so that safety is not compromised.
10% Daily class journal. This documents your participation in the activity of the day, and/ or any demonstration made by the professor or a visiting expert, or that you may see or experience during a field trip. This journal is also the place where you will regularly document your own progress in developing an archaeological experiment and your observations about site formation processes. Your journal will document the materials used, the techniques employed, the embodied skills and personnel required, the timing of activities, the ways that the techniques vary across space and time, especially when discussed in class or readings, and all outcomes achieved, including failures or mistakes or variations. You should record questions for discussion in class at the next opportunity. Additionally, each journal entry should document the resulting detritus or site features that remain following each activity, including photographs and sketches taken throughout the process.
1% Sign up for social media outlets of USCArchaeology in order to receive details about content relevant to this class and related events; this includes Instagram, Twitter, and USC Archaeology and USC Religion Facebook groups.
4% 1% each; 4 assessments of group dynamics (dates wk. 3; wk 7; wk 11; wk 15)
15% (each 5%) Three short practical experience narrative reflections for consideration for posting on the internal USC archaeology blog (details below). These contributions must receive an A grade to be posted publicly, and posting is at the discretion of the professor. Narrative reflections should follow the guidelines handed out in class. Each will be 2-3 pages.
10% (each 5%) Twice during the semester, students submit a short theoretical perspective reflection and discussion question prompt. This is to be posted 48 hours prior to our weekly class meeting (thus, due dates for this assignment vary). Theory reflections should follow the guidelines handed out in class. Each of these two discussion question prompts will be 2-3 pages.
20% Plan, design and create an illustrated experimental plan for a small group archaeological experiment. This will include a step by step description of the planned experimental operation(s), a sketched or illustrated story board, and a description of the hypothesis at issue.
25% Execute the archaeological experiment. Your experiment is a process in which you continue to develop and refine your hypothesis through acquiring materials needed, documenting their use and preparation in your experiment, collecting evidence through the experimental process (=data), testing your hypothesis, revising the hypothesis to the extent possible, and writing-up your experiment. Equivalent of 8-10 pp of research explanation, not including illustrations and not including references that situate your experiment in the context of prior and related work.
5% Verbal presentation, filmed live, of experimental results.
FINAL EXAM – The submission of the final experimental research project and oral presentation is the culminating assignment for this course. These are due as noted in the schedule included here in this syllabus, and all work for the course must be submitted by the final exam date listed in registration class schedule calendar.
Unit 1
Introduction. What do we know about ancient ways? How do we identify ancient practices?
Technologies for Learning. Playing games. Spending time. Apprenticeships.
Unit 2
Critical Consumption: Warmth and fuel: ways of staying warm; systems of fuel creation and consumption.
Shelter, building and moving through the world around us: mudbricks, wood and other structural materials
Unit 3
Tools: Systems of Making; Technologies; Flint knapping
Unit 4
Manipulation and Processing: animal and plant materials as threads and textiles. Displaying and Covering Ourselves; Clothes for Work and Show
Animal and Plant materials as coloring agents. Who Wears Which Colors? Dyeing textiles
Unit 5
Pyrotechnical transformations: pottery making and firing.
Grain toasting trays, jars for brewing, figurines, oil lamps
Unit 6
Taming Plants: Domesticated and Wild Plants; Grain uses, preparations.
Unit 7
Bread Making and related activities (grain grinding, making, baking, eating)
Transformed foods. Chemistry processes essential to traditional lifeways
Unit 8
Food for the Future: Cheese and other storable animal foods
Unit 9
“Neolithic” Food Preparation (meat, vegetables, grains are processed with “period-appropriate” tools).
Feeling Better: Herbal remedies and ineffable cures
Unit 10
Preparation for pyrotechnical transformation 2: metals, ores, minerals
Visions and Graffiti: making paint for rock art
Unit 12
Copper and iron smelting.
Metalsmithing
Units 13, 14, 15
Group Experimental Activities and presentations
(week 16) FINAL EXAM – The submission of the final experimental research project and oral presentation is the culminating assignment for this course. Due by the final date listed in registration class schedule calendar.
2