Browse our current semester course offerings.
Reg. #19846
Wednesday, 12:30-3:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Edith Gonzalez
This course is designed to provide a foundation in museum management - in both its operations and administrative mechanics and the hierarchies and power structures that shape critical museum discourse. Museums are undergoing tremendous transformations, especially in terms of the use, care, and representation of their collections and in respect to reaching increasingly diverse audiences. What was founded as a place of expert research, selective social access, and local/national significance is evolving into a place of both greater reach and frequent cultural and political frictions. The goal of this course is to give you a sense of the tensions between the museum’s traditional operations and obligations and the needs to adjust these principles to demands for museums as equitable platforms of knowledge exchange. Through lectures, guest speakers, group work, and discussions this course provides foundational knowledge on principles of museum management and applies it to important museum management case studies.
Reg. #23158
Mnday, 9:00-11:40am
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Lacey Carpenter
Archaeological collections housed in museum represent a vast and varied dataset for researchers. As museums undertake efforts to document and digitize collections, it has raised new challenges for museums professionals and researchers in their efforts to care for and learn from these artifacts and belongings. Collections may or may not be well-provenienced, making it difficult to use them for study or educational purposes. However, the development of new technologies has provided fresh avenues for working with all kinds of collections.
In this course, students will learn about the history of collecting and have an opportunity to research the origins of UB’s anthropology collections. Throughout the semester, students will explore a variety of nondestructive methods for generating new information from existing collections. Students will also gain experience with methods aimed at increasing accessibility of the collections for future researchers. As part of the course, students will work in small groups to design and complete a research project using UB’s anthropology collections employing one or more of the methods covered in the course.
Reg. #23159
Thursday, 3:30-6:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Mariella Bacigalupo
This interdisciplinary course engages with debates about the controversial concept of the Anthropocene—the idea that humans have irrevocably (and negatively) altered the earth in the current epoch—and debates about the future of (various) humans, their relationships to other species, and planetary transformation. How does anthropogenic climate change affect other living beings, including humans? How do we think about anthropos, or “the human,” in such times? When did the Anthropocene begin, and which humans brought it into being? How are differently situated humans being changed by the rapid environmental changes under way? How are our notions of the human intertwined with those about other forms of life? What kind of worlds are being made and unmade, and for what beings? In exploring these and other questions, we will analyze works by anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, lawyers, feminists, STS thinkers, economists, sociologists, chemists, geologists, and other scientists.
Reg. #23164
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:50am
354 Academic Center
Dr. Albert Fulton
This course explores the manner in which Indigenous peoples of eastern North America interacted with and were in turn influenced by the ecological systems within which they lived, from the end of the last Ice Age through the Contact period, approximately 12,000, 200 years before present.
During this period of time known as the Holocene epoch, the ecosystems of eastern North America responded in complex ways to multiple environmental modulators including climate perturbations, species migrations and extinctions, natural disturbance agents such as fire and storms, and human land-use impacts related to changing settlement systems and the adoption of novel subsistence economies. Human societies were in turn influenced by the regional diversity of and temporal variability in environmental contexts, which provided multiple dynamic pathways for cultural innovation and adaptation across space and time.
By developing greater awareness of critical interactions among Indigenous Americans, the natural environment, and past climate change, we can develop more nuanced perspectives on how best to respond to current and future climatic and ecological transformations affecting all of humanity.
Reg. #21651
Wednesday, 9:30am-12:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Oscar Gil
Course description coming soon.
Reg. #21723
Wednesday, 3:30-6:10pm
354 Academic Center
Dr. Stephen Lycett
There can be few greater challenges to science than studying the behavior of a long-dead animal. This is especially the case with studying hominin behavior. Yet, this challenge must be met if we are to understand our behavioral origins and heritage. Today, only one species of hominin exists: Homo sapiens. An absence of closely related hominin taxa leaves us with a limited range of potential models that we might look to for inspiration. For instance, do chimpanzees provide clues or should we look to modern hunter-gatherers? Does psychology provide an answer? Do we need to look to evolutionary theory? Can experiments be of assistance in a fundamentally historical science? With stone tools and the debris of their manufacture comprising much of our basic primary data, what hope is there for a rigorous science of hominin behavior? History shows that the field is subject to wild speculations. For instance, Neanderthals are sometimes portrayed as close brethren who would not evoke response if encountered on the New York subway (at least if dressed in a business suit, so the story goes). At other times they have been portrayed as fundamentally different in behavior and intelligence from our own species. Which is it?
Reg. #14864
Monday, 12:00-2:40pm
158 Spaulding Quad
Dr. Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel
This course is designed to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of biological anthropology. Here we will review topics such as evolutionary theory, basic genetics, the evolution of the primates, human evolution, modern human diversity, the evolution of cognition and language, human social behavior, and the impacts of health and disease. The course will be taught via a mixture of lectures, class discussions and practical exercises.
Reg. #12259
Thursday, 11:00am-1:40pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Timothy Chevral
The four ‘important questions’ usually addressed in anthropological archaeology deal with modern human origins and development, or ‘what makes us human’, the transition from small scale foraging, collecting, and hunting societies to agricultural societies, then the eventual emergence and the institutionalization of more structurally and politically complicated societies, and finally, the beginning and development of ‘civilization’. These notions are important, but what do they even mean? They largely consider economy and political organization as if they are the only factors that determine the human condition. There are other complimentary issues to think about as well: the human relationship with the physical world of nature, places, and ‘things’, the supernatural and ideological world, the interpersonal and intergroup relationships of people to each other and to ancestors near and distant, and the kind of social and natural forces that drive stasis or change through time.
This means that we will examine the development of unique ways of life in select parts of the Old World, think about them comparatively, and at the same time fit them into some basic current conceptual and theoretical discussions within archaeology, as a preview to the more intensive theoretical review that will come in the second semester and beyond, as well as more specialized courses in specific areas, time periods, and topics.
Reg. #15135
Friday, 9:30am-12;10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Vasiliki Neofotistos
This seminar is designed to give first year graduate students a basic grounding in classic social theory developed in Britain and the United States between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. APY 655 is the first in a two-part survey of theory in socio-cultural anthropology. The second half (APY654), taught in the spring semester, covers subsequent developments. Our emphasis will be on the ways in which classic social theory can be used as a tool to help illuminate contemporary issues in anthropology.
Reg. #23165
Tuesday, 3:30-6:10pm
261 Academic Center (Paley Library)
Dr. Colin Quinn
This course explores the archaeology of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. We will explore key transformations in social, economic, political, and ideological organization; from the arrival of farming to the emergence of regional hierarchies with persistent inequalities. Students will learn about the different intellectual frameworks employed in European archaeology and how they have influenced how archaeologists have asked questions, analyzed data, and developed narratives of social change and continuity in different regions of the continent.
We will address a variety of major topics in prehistoric Europe. These include: the spread of farming and changing relationships between people and landscapes; collective identities, ideologies, and actions in early villages and towns; the emergence of specialized craft and political economies associated with metal; and how to synthesize archaeological and archaeogenetic evidence of migration, kinship, and social change. The final assessment in the course will be an independent research paper that combines theory, method, and an archaeological dataset from Europe.