ANTH 1130 — The Archaeology of Ancient Europe
Anthropology is concerned with the many ways that humans have adapted to their physical and social environments, including the systems of meaning and social organization that they use, as well as the historical development of those adaptions. There are a number of subfields within Anthropology in America: (Archaeology, Physical Anthropology, Linguistics, and applied Anthropology), and this course focuses on the remote past of Europe before the advent of writing (history), as revealed through archaeological research. We will focus primarily on Termperate Europe (north of the Alps), but to do so we will repeatedly run into the sophisticated cultures of the Mediterranean Basin. Evidence will be considered starting with the first people in Europe, through millennia of hunting and gathering, and then then the broad changes that occurred with the advent of agriculture and metal use, and the increasing societal complexity, ending with the coming of the Romans who brought "civilization" to their northern neighbors.