Graduate Program in Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology

Online course, 30 hours, 3 credits

 

“Some of the most interesting questions we can ask about early societies are social. They are about people and about relations between people, about the exercise of power and about the nature and scale of organization” (Bahn and Renfrew 2008, 177)

 

The last 10,000 years of relatively stable climatic conditions have seen an unprecedented abundance of change in human communities. The variation in material culture across the globe cannot be explained through environmental or economic adaptation alone, which is why archaeologists have increasingly looked to sociology and anthropology for a complementary explanatory framework.

 

The recognition of the importance of the social does not mean that it determines other aspects of life. As eloquently stated by John Barrett ‘Social realities do not lie behind the monument and artifact, but emerged from their existence’ (Barrett  1994).

 

In the course we explore topics such as inequality, authority, and interaction.  We start with the so called egalitarian societies, drawing on case studies from the Eurasian Palaeolithic to Aboriginal Australia. The mechanisms by which the egalitarian societies transform into ranked communities is a subject of great interest especially as social realities typically ascribed to egalitarian societies of the Stone Age are crucial for the understanding of life in the later Bronze and Iron Ages.

 

Urban life occupies a central place in this course, given its associate economic and political phenomena such as rise of specialists and specialized production. We investigate theoretical constructs on a number of case studies from the Eastern Mediterranean and other parts of the world.  As centralized states expand and interact with their peers as well as non-state neighbors, center-and-periphery thinking and post-colonial critique of world system models receive special attention here.  We discuss Marry Louise Pratts ‘contact zone’ and Richard White’s ’middle ground’. We deal also with social network analysis in order to free the archaeological study of centrality from specific geographic determination, but rather to see past reality as the result of interaction and social and political practices.

 

The final themes of the course are agency, socio-political change and the question of balance between individual and communal agency. 

 

	Topic	Hours
1	Why and how to study past societies?	2
2	Egalitarian societies. Myth or reality?	2
3-4	Care to join the affluent society? On Leisure, violence and death	4
5	Early agricultural societies. On storage and social organization	4
6	Who is the boss? On leadership. Part 1 - Big Man	2
7	On leadership. Part 2 - Too many chiefs?	4
8	Archaic states. The "Emergence of civilization"	2
9	De-centralizing power: Post-colonial critiques of world system theories in archaeology. Contact spaces and middle grounds.	2
10	Archaeology of change. "Prime movers", innovation, or how the cows of Timor have learnt to plow	2
11	Archaeology of change. Agency	2
12	Archaeology of change. Social network analysis	2
13	Final discussion	2