Course Syllabus

INVENTING THE PAST

ARCH 1835

Spring 2015

Professor Felipe Rojas

Tuesday and Thursday 1-2:20 pm

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Long before archaeology became an established academic discipline, individuals and communities had used landscapes, monuments, and portable objects to conceptualize their own past. Even before the transition from hunting-and-gathering to sedentarism, human beings have been manipulating deliberately the physical traces of prior human habitation in order to imagine and explain their own antiquity. In this course, we will delve into the remote origins of antiquarianism and archaeology by examining ancient cases of recovery, interpretation, collection, display, and destruction of even more ancient material culture. Our scope is deliberately comparative; we will range broadly across time and space, exploring examples of antiquarianism in the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and Asia dating from about 10,000 years before the present to the Renaissance and beyond. By the end of the term, students will have become familiar with a wide range of ancient cases of manipulation of the material traces of the past, as well as with a variety of contemporary theoretical approaches to the archaeological study of memory. This course is aimed at students interested in the history of ideas, the early history of antiquarianism and archaeology, as well as those who wish to study how the people of one culture interacted with the physical traces of another.

(While the course is open to everyone, the readings for this syllabus were chosen with upper-level undergraduate students or a combination of upper-level under-graduate and graduate students in mind.)

STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES

Everyone is required to attend regularly, read all weekly assignments, write weekly discussion questions, and participate in discussion. 

GRADING

Undergraduate Students:

-Final exam (25%)

-Three short projects (45%—15% each)

         -Project 1: Alternative Horizons/Alternative Biographies  (Due Feb. 19)

         -Project 2: Comparative Antiquarianism (Due Mar. 17)

         -Project 3: Why try? (Due Apr. 21)

-Weekly 150-200 word online discussion entries (20%)

-Attendance and active participation (10%)

Graduate Students:

-Final paper (20-25 pages) 

-Lead in-class discussion at least once 

-Weekly 150-200 word online discussion entries 

-Attendance and active participation 

TEXTS

There is no textbook for this class; all readings will be available through Canvas, either in .pdf form or via links to digitized texts.

 

Class schedule and readings

 

PRELIMINARIES

 

         Week 1 Introduction

Th Jan 22   

         Week 2 Archaeology and Antiquarianism (Comparative Perspectives)

Tu Jan 27

Bahn “Introduction and Chapter 1”

Schnapp “Archaeology and the Presence of the Past”

Schnapp “Antique and Medieval Sources”

[Trigger “Classical and Other Text-Based Archaeologies”]

Th Jan 29

Schnapp “Europe of the Antiquaries” and “From Antiquary to Archaeologist”

López Lujan “Mexica Antiquarianism”

Beaulieu “Mesopotamian Antiquarianism”

[Momigliano “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”]

 

INVENTING THE PAST

 

         Week 3 Prehistoric Histories and Heirlooms [Catie Steidl]

Tu Feb 3 History before History

Hodder “The Invention of History”

Batuman “The Sanctuary”

[Schmidt “Göbekli Tepe: Between Meaning and Interpretation”]

Th Feb 5 Object biographies

Lillios “Archaeology of Heirlooms”

Joyce “Concrete Memories”

Kopytoff “Cultural Biography of Things”

         Week 4 Lieux de Mémoire [Frédérique Schless]

Tu Feb 10 Landscapes of Memory

Holtorf “Life-Histories of Megaliths”

Rojas “Kings of the Deep”

Nora “Realms of Memory”

[Bradley “Remaking Ancient Pasts”]

Th Feb 12Cities of Memory

Alcock “Athenian Agora”

Ousterhout “Sacred Geographies and Holy Cities”

Hung “Tiananmen Square”

Smith “To Replace”     

         Week 5 Antiquity Inscribed 

Tu Feb 17 No class

 

Th Feb 19 Antiquity Inscribed                  Project 1 Due

Mousavi “Persepolis and the Puzzle of the Cuneiform Inscriptions”

Rojas “Signs of Gods, Signs of Men”

Hung “On Rubbings”

 

STRATEGIES

 

         Week 6 Detecting the Past                    

Tu Feb 24 Ruins (Comparative Perspectives)

Schnapp “Sense of the Past during the Greco-Roman Era”

Hung “Where are the Ruins in Traditional Chinese Art?”

Th Feb 26 Out of Time and Place

Hamman “Chronological Pollution”

Nagel and Wood “What Counted as an Antiquity in the Renaissance”

[Nagel and Wood “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”]        

         Week 7 Collecting the Past                  

Tu Mar 3 Rome

Liverani “Culture of Collecting in Roma”

Hansen “Recollecting the Past”

Elsner “Framing Knowledge”

[Pomian “Between the Visible and the Invisible”]

Th Mar 5 Elsewhere

Küchler “Virtual Archives”

Brown “From Discard to Divination”

[Murray “Antiquarianism of and in Pre-Literate Societies”]

         Week 8 Touring the Past

Tu Mar 10 Imaginary Troys

Vermeule “Neon Ilion and Ilium Novum”

Rose “The Concept of Troy after Antiquity”

Sage “Roman Visitors to Ilium”

[Elsner and Rubies “Introduction”]

Th Mar 12 Visiting Antiquity

Elsner “From the Pyramids to Pausanias and Piglet”

Lightfoot “Pilgrims and Ethnographers”

[Rojas and Sergueenkova “Erudite Travel”]

         Week 9 Forgetting              Project 2 Due

Tu Mar 17

Connerton “Seven Types of Forgetting”

Küchler “The Place of Memory”

Th Mar 19                                     

Meskell “Negative Heritage”

Kousser “Destruction and Memory”

 

         Week 10 Spring Break

 

PEOPLE

 

         Week 11 Experts, idiots, and strategies of inquiry

Tu Mar 31Experts and Idiots

Anderson “Classified Knowledge”

Rojas and Sergueenkova “Traces of Tarhuntas”

[Lloyd “Gurus, Experts, Idiots, and the Modalities of Debate”]

Th Apr 2 Strategies of Inquiry

Hung “The Transparent Stone”

Rojas and Sergueenkova “The Smell of Time”

[Rojas “Material Connoisseurship in Classical Antiquity”]

         Week 12 Horizons: whose past is it anyway?

Tu Apr 7 A Past of One’s Own

Bassett “Collecting and the Creation of History”

Neudecker “Statues and Fragments in Roman Gardens”

Rojas “Antiquarianism in Roman Sardis

Th Apr 9 Other People’s Past

Franci “Perceiving the Art of “Others” in the Ancient Near East”

Bleichmar “ Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections”

Schnapp “Ancient Europe and Native Americans: A Comparative Reflection on the Roots of Antiquarianism”

         Week 13 From the Age of Ignorance and Darkness

Tu Apr 14 Islamic Antiquarianism (primarily Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula)

Bowersock “Hellenism and Islam”

Flood “Coptic and Byzantine ‘Altars’ in Islamic Contexts"

Cooperson “Abbasid Antiquarianism”

Haarman “Medieval Muslim Perceptions of Pharaonic Egypt

Th Apr 16 Ottoman Antiquarianism

Redford “Seljuqs and the Antique”

Raby “A Sultan of Paradox”

Ousterhout “The East, the West, and the Appropriation of the Past”

         Week 14 Indigenous (and Folkloric) Archaeologies     Project 3 Due

Tu Apr 21 Ottoman Greece and India

Hamilakis “Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece”

Subhramanyan “Traces of the Ancients in India”

Th Apr 23 Subaltern Antiquarianism

Lahiri “Living Antiquarianism”

Brown “A Conversation with the Gods”

Keesling “Misundersood Gestures”

Voss “Antiquity Imagined”