Introduction to thin-section petrography of stone and ceramic archaeological materials. Using polarized light microscopy, the first half of this course will cover the basics of mineralogy and the petrography of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. The second half will focus on the petrographic description of ceramic materials, mainly pottery, with emphasis on the interpretation of provenance and technology. As part of this course, students will characterize and analyze archaeological samples from various collections. Prior knowledge of geology is not required.

The Etruscans, who spoke a language unlike any others known, were cast by their Greek and Roman rivals as outsiders and enemies: pirates, lovers of luxury, loose women. Today we must rely on the archaeological evidence of painted tombs, decorated Tuscan temples and massive engineering works to correct the picture. The course will survey a millennium (1st millennium BCE) of Etruscan culture through archaeological sites, works of art and everyday material culture, especially illustrated with objects in the collection of the Penn Museum. An additional insight into Italic culture comes from tomb groups excavated for the Museum at the Faliscan settlement of Narce. Students will gain familiarity with the societies of pre-Roman Italy through close study of their vases, jewels, arms, armor, textiles and tools, and even their very bones, and discover a surprising amount of Etruscan heritage surviving today.

The class presents a survey of the art and archaeology of Mesopotamia beginning with the appearance of the first cities and ending with the fall of the Assyrian Empire in the seventh century BCE. It presents the major artistic monuments of Mesopotamian culture, embedding them in their historical context. Focus is placed in particular on the interactions with surrounding cultures of Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf and Anatolia in order to decenter the discourse from a strictly Mesopotamian perspective. The format is lecture; assignments involve reading response papers; there are in class midterm and final exams.

An introduction to the principles and practices of Greek Epigraphy. Study of selected Greek inscriptions.

Digital methodologies are an integral part of contemporary archaeological practice, and demand that archaeologists to hold a new set of skills and knowledge fundamentals. This course will expose students to a broad range of digital approaches through a review of relevant literature and through applied learning opportunities centered on a course project. The technological underpinnings, best practices, and influences on archaeological practice and theory will be discussed for each method covered in the course. Applied learning opportunities in digital data collection methods will include: aerial and satellite remote sensing, global navigation satellite system (GNSS) survey, 3D scanning methods, close-range photogrammetry, and near-surface geophysical prospection. Students will also have opportunities for practical experience in digital database design and management, geographic information science (GIS) and 3D modeling and visualization. Students will communicate the results of the course project in a digital story that will be presented at the end of the term. Prior archaeological classwork and/or experience preferred.

Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2020 semester, the topic will be Migrating Materiality: Ivory Carving Around the Mediterranean. The craft of ivory carving around the Mediterranean is contingent upon the availability of imported elephant tusks, from either South East Asia or, more frequently, from the African continent. The shifting winds of trade routes offer an interpretive paradigm with which to analyze ivory objects from a variety of different cultural groups: the lack or abundance of ivory and the resulting desire for or surfeit of the material shapes its meaning and use around the Mediterranean basin. The study of ivory objects as they migrate around the Mediterranean allows us to investigate the rich intercultural interactions between Eastern and Western Christians, and both of these with the Islamic world. This course focuses on an object-oriented knowledge of ivory artifacts, with a strong emphasis on the collections at the Penn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other area collections.

Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2020 semester, the topic will be: The Icon. This seminar explores the Byzantine icon and its legacy. Spanning nearly two millennia, from the emergence of Christian sacred portraiture to the reception of icon painting by the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde, the seminar will introduce you to the history, historiography, and theories of the icon. While our focus will be on Byzantium and the wider world of Orthodox Christianity, especially in the Slavic Balkans and Eastern Europe, the seminar will also engage with fundamental questions concerning the nature, status, and agency of images across cultures. Topics to be addressed include iconoclasm and the problem of idolatry; the social and ritual lives of icons; authorship, originality, and replication; viewer response and the cultural construction of vision; the frontier between art and the sacred image; and the afterlife of the icon in modernity.

This course is intended to familiarize new graduate students with the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the wide range of scholarly interests and approaches used by faculty at Penn and neighboring institutions, as well as to provide an introduction to archaeological methods and theory in a Mediterranean context. 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 five sections: Introduction to the Mediterranean Section; Collections; Method and Theory in Mediterranean Archaeology; Museum Work; and Ethics. 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.

Art history, and its cousins in religious, social, political and literary studies, have long been fascinated with the question of narrative: how do images engage time, tell stories? These are fundamental questions for ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian and Mediterranean art history and archaeology, whose rich corpus of narrative images is rarely considered in the context of "Western" art. Relations between words and things, texts and images, were as fundamental to the ancient cultures we examine as they are to modern studies. As we weigh classic modern descriptions of narrative and narratology, we will bring to bear recent debates about how (ancient) images, things, monuments, and designed spaces engage with time, space, and event, and interact with cultural memory. We will ask "who is the story for, and why?" for public and private narratives ranging from political histories to mythological encounters. Our case studies will be drawn from the instructors' expertise in Mesopotamian visual culture, and in the visual cultures of the larger Mediterranean world from early Greek antiquity to the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods. One central and comparative question, for instance, is the nature of recording history in pictures and texts in the imperial projects of Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, the Hellenistic kingdoms, and Rome.

A one-semester survey of Islamic art and architecture which examines visual culture as it functions within the larger sphere of Islamic culture in general. Particular attention will be given to relationships between visual culture and literature, using specific case studies, sites or objects which may be related to various branches of Islamic literature, including historical, didactic, philosophical writings, poetry and religious texts. All primary sources are available in English translation.