Archaeology of Communities

What makes a community? What binds human groups together and rends them apart? How do people engage traditions, narratives, landscapes, and material culture to generate notions of heritage, solidarity, or distinction? Does the belonging and inclusion of ‘community’ always rely on the exclusion of some ‘other?’ How do we succeed or fail at developing collaborative responses to collective challenges? This module explores how materials, places, practices, and ideas work together to create and maintain communities. We will examine how notions of communal identity and belonging rely upon material infrastructure – monuments, landscapes, and objects – the evoke the past, engage the senses, and frame shared meanings. By exploring archaeological and ethnographic examples from around the world, students will learn to pose critical questions of their own communities and to view them within a broader comparative framework. Readings, case-studies, and discussions will cover: ritual and religion; environmental and economic logistics; local face-to-face interactions vs. supra-local identities; reciprocity and gift-giving; shared craft practices and embodied experiences; and the cultivation of linguistic, narrative, and material heritage. Throughout, we will grapple with a recurring theme: the interaction of ideology and materiality in the creation and maintenance of communal formations.