Introduction to Archaeology
Anthro 304 / ARY 301 Spring 1998Prof. Samuel M. Wilson
Department of Anthropology, University of Texas
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Final Paper
For this assignment I would like for you to pick a topic (having to do with archaeology) that you have always been interested in. The topic you choose could come from your readings, our discussions in class, or your own experience. I would like for this topic to be something that makes a difference to you personally, so think of the ways in which the past has some bearing on who you are today.
I would like you to hand in a brief statement of what your topic is about Thursday April 2nd.
The topic given above gives you a great deal of freedom and wide open possibilities. If you would like some more suggestion as to what topics you might choose, read on:
alternate paper topics. . .
Option 1:
In the second half of the course we will be talking about several complex societies, like those of Mesopotamia, the Nile, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. There are others which we will not have time to consider in too much depth, such as the prehistoric states of sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America.There is another complex society with which we have intimate familiarity, and which is so much a part of the environment we live in that we rarely think about it or analyze it consciously; we could call it Austin in 1994, but our small world is so systemically interlinked with other cities, states, nations, economies, and political systems that we might go so far as to call our civilization the 20th century global polity or "world system".
I would like for you to take an in-depth look at the similarities and differences between our world and the world of one of the ancient civilizations listed above. This will require that you develop, through reading and research, reasonably detailed knowledge of the ancient civilization you choose. Your texts can give you a start, and the books' bibliographies can supply excellent references for additional readings (as can the subject catalogue at the libraries). The list of potential references dealing with each of the civilizations listed above is vast, and obviously you cannot read it all, so be selective, but please cite at least three sources besides your texts as a source of information for your comparisons.
Human societies are intricate; all of the components of a cultural system are interwoven one with the other. Analytically, however, it sometimes becomes necessary to break down the components of a system into more manageable units -- for example, economy, political organization, social, religion, trade, interaction with other civilizations, and so on (world view, ideology, cosmology, philosophy . . . ). You do not have to use these specific categories, but I recommend that you find some way of breaking down the complexly interconnected aspects of complex societies, in order to derive greater insights from your comparisons.
Option 2:
We share something with the ancient people we have studied in this class: we are their descendants. For your final paper please write (to the extent possible), a factual history of your antecedents as far back as the end of the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago. Where did they come from; how did they live, to what places did they migrate? "Factual to the extent possible" is of course not all that far, even if you are in the line of succession for some throne. But you can make inferences about your past given what you know. Since one's ancestors number in the millions (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-, 16 great-great, and so on), you have some latitude in choosing what lineage you want to explore. It might be interesting to choose a non-European aspect of your ancestry, or deal with lineages from two areas. We'll discuss this further in class. Note: this paper requires research and a firm basis in demonstrable facts (as opposed to a speculations on "a day in the life of my ancestor...").