ANTH 515. The Archaeology of Politics.

This course explores how archaeologists investigate past political life using theoretical approaches, archaeological methods and data sets. It examines how modalities of power and political practices articulated and organized social relations at multiple scales and contexts ranging from the institutional (e.g., states, governments, guilds, religious orders) to those of everyday life (e.g., diet, residence, gender). The course interrogates the history of archaeology’s engagement with past politics together with current topical foci such as the politics of ritual, identity, and gender, resistance to authority, production and consumption practices, commensal politics, landscape production, the materiality of politics and the politics of materials.