Courses for Fall 2025
General Information About Courses
AAMW course numbers are crosslisted with departmentally based courses. Not all courses of relevance to AAMW students have AAMW numbers. Potentially relevant courses can be found in the rosters from the departments and programs in the History of Art, Ancient History, Anthropology, Classical Studies, History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Religious Studies, Architecture and Historic Preservation. In addition courses may be taken for Penn credit at Bryn Mawr and Princeton. Advanced students may also request to take a specialist course at other universities in commuting range. If the professor teaching the course agrees, the AAMW Graduate Chair will give the class a Penn Independent Study number, and transcribe the grade received.
| Title | Instructors | Location | Time | Description | Cross listings | Fulfills | Registration notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AAMW 5231-401 | Archaeological Field Methods | Holly Pittman | F 8:30 AM-11:29 AM | This seminar will prepare students for participation in the excavations at the site of ancient Lagash, modern Tell al-Hiba, in southern Iraq that are scheduled to take place in the fall semester. The topics to be considered are introduction to the recording methods, use of equipment, review of the ceramic sequence, methods of recording, drawing, photography. Permission of the instructor required for participation in the class. | ARTH5231401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5260-401 | Material & Methods in Mediterranean Archaeology | Ann L Kuttner | R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | This course is intended to provide an introduction to archaeological methods and theory in a Mediterranean context, focusing on the contemporary landscape. The class will cover work with museum collections (focusing on the holdings of the Penn Museum), field work and laboratory analysis in order to give students a diverse toolkit that they can later employ in their own original research. Each week, invited lecturers will address the class on different aspects of archaeological methodology in their own research, emphasizing specific themes that will be highlighted in readings and subsequent discussion. The course is divided into three sections: Method and Theory in Mediterranean Archaeology; Museum collections; and Decolonizing Mediterranean Archaeology. The course is designed for new AAMW graduate students, though other graduate students or advanced undergraduate students may participate with the permission of the instructor. | ANTH5026401, CLST6300401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5305-401 | Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome | Charles Brian Rose | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | An intensive exploration of Rome's urban topography during the Republican and Imperial periods (6th c. B.C. through 4th c. A.D.) Using archaeological and textual sources, including the Etruscan and Roman collections of the Penn Museum, the goal will be to reconstruct the built environment and decoration of Rome over the course of a millennium. Of interest to students of classics, archaeology, art history, and architecture. Some familiarity with Rome will be a plus, but is not required. | ARTH3305401, ARTH5305401, CLST3305401, CLST5305401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5390-401 | Archaeobotany Seminar | Chantel E. White | F 8:30 AM-11:29 AM | In this course we will approach the relationship between plants and people from archaeological and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate diverse plant consumption, use, and management strategies. Topics will include: archaeological formation processes, archaeobotanical sampling and recovery, lab sorting and identification, quantification methods, and archaeobotany as a means of preserving cultural heritage. Students will learn both field procedures and laboratory methods of archaeobotany through a series of hands-on activities and lab-based experiments. The final research project will involve an original in-depth analysis and interpretation of archaeobotanical specimens. By the end of the course, students will feel comfortable reading and evaluating archaeobotanical literature and will have a solid understanding of how archaeobotanists interpret human activities of the past. | ANTH5230401, CLST7313401, MELC6930401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5400-401 | Medieval Art Seminar | Sarah M. Guerin | T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | This course focuses on issues relevant in medieval art history. Topics vary from semester to semester, and range from materiality, relics and reliquaries, to issues of facture and urban development. | ARTH5400401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5570-401 | Archaeology of Landscapes | Chad Hill | M 10:15 AM-1:14 PM | Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds. | ANTH5570401, LALS5570401 | ||||||
| AAMW 5620-401 | Intro to Digital Archaeology | Jason Herrmann | MW 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | Students in this course will be exposed to the broad spectrum of digital approaches in archaeology with an emphasis on fieldwork, through a survey of current literature and applied learning opportunities that focus on African American mortuary landscapes of greater Philadelphia. As an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course, we will work with stakeholders from cemetery companies, historic preservation advocacy groups, and members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to collect data from three field sites. We will then use these data to reconstruct the original plans, untangle site taphonomy, and assess our results for each site. Our results will be examined within the broader constellation of threatened and lost African American burial grounds and our interpretations will be shared with community stakeholders using digital storytelling techniques. This course can count toward the minor in Digital Humanities, minor in Archaeological Science and the Graduate Certificate in Archaeological Science. | ANTH3307401, ANTH5220401, CLST3307401, CLST5620401, MELC3950401 | ||||||
| AAMW 6130-401 | Landscapes and Seascapes of the Ancient Mediterranean | Thomas F. Tartaron | W 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | The Mediterranean environment is both diverse and unique, and nurtured numerous complex societies along its shores in antiquity. This seminar offers a primer on theoretical and methodological approaches to studying landscapes and seascapes of the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the early modern era, at scales from local to international and on land and underwater. Concepts from processual, post-processual, and current archaeologies will be considered, and field techniques including excavation and surface survey, remote sensing and geophysics, GIS modeling, and ethnography/ethnoarchaeology are examined. Course content and discussion focus on case studies that illustrate how these tools are used to reconstruct the appearance and resources of the natural environment; overland and maritime routes; settlement location, size, function, and demography; social and economic networks; and agricultural, pastoral, and nomadic lifeways. Seminar participants will develop case studies of their own geographical and chronological interest. | CLST5318401 | ||||||
| AAMW 6269-401 | Classical Myth and the Image | Ann L Kuttner | CANCELED | The peoples of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds shared a vast body of stories about human and not-human beings set in a legendary deep past or supernatural present - "Classical myth." Even their neighbor cultures took up those stories (or, sometimes, gave them). The stories as spoken, read, or performed turn up in surviving ancient literature. But from the very point when Greek myth began to be written down, those stories were told with images also. Many arts of the Mediterranean world explored myth at temples and sanctuaries, in civic spaces, theaters, parks, houses and palaces, for tombs and trophies - and even on the body upon weapons, clothes and jewelry. Love and desire and hate, hope and fear and consolation, war and peace, pleasure and excitement, power and salvation, the nature of this world and the cosmos, justice and duty and heroism, fate and free will, suffering and crime: mythological images probed the many domains of being human in order to move the emotions and minds of people (and of gods). Our class samples this story art to ask about its makers and viewers and contexts. What, also, were relations between images and texts and language? What about religious belief vs invention, truth vs fiction? What might it mean to look at this ancient art today, and to represent the old stories in post-ancient cultures? The class introduces ways of thinking about what images and things do; we will read in some relevant literature (drama, epic, novels, etc); and our Penn Museum will be a resource. No prerequisites--no prior knowledge of art history, archaeology, myth or Mediterranean antiquity is assumed. | ARTH2269401, ARTH6269401, CLST3416401, CLST5416401 | ||||||
| AAMW 6290-401 | Architects and Empire: Roman Architecture and Urbanism | Mantha Zarmakoupi | MW 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | Architecture is the most striking legacy of Rome and the well-preserved remains of Roman buildings dominate our vision of the empire. Although Roman architecture has been studied since the Renaissance, it is only since the middle of the 20th century that it has come to be appreciated for the developments in concrete construction, which led to a revolution in the treatment of interior space and landscape architecture. Indeed, Rome’s architectural revolution radically changed both cities and countryside. Romans developed a wide range of new architectural forms and technological innovations in order to meet the increasingly sophisticated and diverse needs of their society. The purpose of the course is to shed light on Roman architectural and urban projects within their social, political, religious, and physical contexts. Throughout, the emphasis will be on concepts of organizing space, issues of structure, materials, decoration and proportion, the role of architecture in Roman society, and on the varied ways that architecture was employed by individuals and communities to express and enhance their status. | ARTH2290401, ARTH6290401, CLST3415401 |