The archaeology of Mediterranean landscapes

This course offers a survey of the archaeology of settled landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world, including both the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. In particular, the course will focus on city-country dichotomies in order to study the patterns of development, demography, and land use in selected case study areas. While the emergence of urban centers in the Mediterranean and Near East will be an important consideration, the main focus of the course will be to study these landscapes in a contextualized way, exploring the interrelatedness of the city center and its hinterland and examining the ways in which human activity in the landscape over time brings about change. The course will be interested in land use and exploitation, agricultural practice, the spatial and temporal dynamics of settled landscapes, and the processes (and concomitant effects) of urbanism. It will also focus on the methods of collecting landscape data through surface survey, as well as other means of geophysical prospection and excavation. Case studies will be used to explore these themes, in addition to others, and will provide students an opportunity to write an in-depth treatment that requires an analysis of survey data and survey outcomes. Various sets of archaeological data, as well as appropriate primary sources, will be considered in each set of case studies in order to offer contextualized readings of archaeological landscapes. Students will produce a substantial research project based on a chosen case study