This unit will provide an introduction to the biological and archaeological data which reflect upon human variation and cultural history, from the origins of humans, through a selection of the most significant ancient civilisations, to the cultures of the world on the eve of the colonial era. It will highlight the importance of choice and culture as important factors in the emergence of modern human beings and their varied ways of seeing the world and managing many different environments.
>From Origins to Civilisations sets up a broad framework into which the later
Archaeology and Biological Anthropology units in the School can be placed.
Taken with the other First Year unit, Introduction to Archaeology (ARCH 1111),
taught 1st semester each year, it provides the necessary chronological, methodological
and theoretical bases for students to continue on to a wide variety of units
provided for later year students within our School. Most academic staff of
the Archaeology Section give lectures in ARCH 1112 in order to introduce
potential students for later year units to particular areas of expertise
and styles of teaching.
In the first weeks of the course we follow the course of physical change
in early hominids and the development of behaviour that in the past has been
taken as indicative of early human “culture”, for example tool making, management
of fire, and the concept of the base camp as a residential focus for a cooperating
social group. We follow the initial spread of early hominids as small foraging
groups out of Africa into Asia and Europe. The unit then moves to the ways
in which modern archaeologists view a number of complex phenomena of cultural
evolution, such as the rise of language and art, the colonizations of Australia
and the Americas, the origins of agriculture and the rapid expansion of farming
populations, some of whom eventually began to live in highly complex urban
systems with literacy, metallurgy and the rise of warring states. The final
weeks of the course introduce the archaeology of some of the most significant
ancient civilizations, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and the Americas. We
finish with brief presentations of Roman and Celtic archaeology.
Modern popular opinion tends to be easily overawed by what is seen as a surprisingly
high level of technological skill evident in the monuments and material culture
recovered from the ancient civilisations of both the Old and New Worlds.
We often overlook their problems, now familiar to us as erosion, salinity,
pollution and violence, in wishing only to perceive romantic ancestral ruins.
In viewing the hundreds of millennia of human cultural evolution before these
civilisations we often underrate the extraordinary successes of ancestral
human communities and their abilities, not only to survive, but to flourish
and expand in many difficult and varied environmental conditions. The same
applies to those cultures of the world, indeed the majority of the world
from a geographical perspective, which did not develop or become incorporated
into states until recently. Such cultures include those of Aboriginal Australia
and many of Australia’s near neighbours in the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
We examine some of these regions in the course.
ARCH 1112 comprises 21 hours of lectures, 9 hours of tutorials and 9 hours
of films. The tutorials will be given by staff and by graduate students in
the school. A brick of tutorial readings will be made available in the first
week of the semester, as will detailed lists of tutorial and essay topics.
COURSE READING