CLASS 6040

Merchants, Migrants, Barbarians, Pirates

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2023-2024.

The history of the broader Mediterranean world is filled with human movements across a variety of scales, from individual traders and mercenaries to the emigration of whole societies. And yet, identifying these movements is controversial. Some constitute racist fantasies (e.g., Petrie's Egyptian "dynastic race"), others are dismissed as products of the "tyranny of the text" (e.g., the biblical Philistines). Regardless, human movements remain a fixture of how we understand the region. Through case studies, we will explore how archaeologists have interpreted and identified such movements, developing an understanding of how modern methods can—and cannot—identify individual- and population-level movements in the archaeological record. Moreover, we will see how such movements—real or imagined—are often more important to modern identities than ancient realities.

When Offered Spring.

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