ANTH 361 - Ancient Environments and Human Legacies

Many, if not most of today’s geopolitical problems can be traced to how people interact with the environment. Warfare, globalization, market economies, food production, ethnic conflicts, and disease are all contingent on the relationship between human beings and their environments. This course focuses on the complexity and nuance of those relationships through both space and time by utilizing an archaeological perspective. While many academic fields now focus on topics relating to environments, archaeology works with a dataset that spans the entirety of human history. Such a dataset allows archaeological researchers to ask powerful and fundamental questions, such as: How do human societies respond to environmental change? Have human beings ever successfully found a balance between themselves and their natural world? What events created today’s environmental challenges? What leads to the downfall of a society? This course will consider questions like these through various case-studies across the globe that deal with the diversity of human societies and the specific environments from which they emerged. (MC)

Credits: 1.00
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Social Relations,Inst.& Agents
Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements

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