REL 303: Ancient Ways of Living: Experimental Archaeology
(draft version)
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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: swartz@usc.edu
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No prior background is assumed or required. Students of all majors can succeed in this course.
Course objectives:
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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.
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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.
… 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.
---Evgeny Morozov
---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).
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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 humanenvironment 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
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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
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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
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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 “periodappropriate” 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.
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