Winter 2020 / Winter 2019 - ANTH 321 - Dr. Russell Adams 

Course Description  

About 14,000 years ago, human groups in the ancient Middle East began to undergo a series of major transformations. Small groups of hunters and gatherers settled into the world’s first farming villages. From these villages arose larger settlements, and eventually complex urban civilizations. How and why did these changes take place? Why did ancient civilizations evolve in repeated cycles of expansion and collapse? What do the similarities and differences in the development of early civilizations tell us about the nature of culture change, of civilization and the state, and of human society itself?  

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This course will take a broadly chronological approach to reviewing the development of human society in the Old World through the archaeological record. Beginning with the first sedentarized human populations we will review key stages including the origins of agriculture, evolving social complexity, the development of writing, of urban life and the emergence of state level societies. The course will review the evidence from the ancient Middle East (Ancient Near East), Egypt, the Indus Valley and the eastern Mediterranean. At the end of the course, we will also compare these developments with the emergence of complex societies in the New World, and consider one of the key questions in the study of complex societies: “collapse.”  

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By necessity, our review of individual regions and periods will be brief, but will allow us the opportunity to cover a wide sample of human cultural developments, and to understand these in the context of cultural responses to different environmental and geographic contexts. This approach focuses attention on the way in which the evolution of social complexity occurs, rather than on the memorization of facts and dates alone. The course provides a context for understanding the process of cultural evolution in the past as well as in today’s world by exploring why we are the way we are, and how we got here.