An individual's life course is often reflected, enhanced, and defined by their relations to other individuals. This course will investigate the concept of kinship in the Roman world through textual, visual, and archaeological evidence. We will explore relationships at all levels of society from the imperial family to the slaves and freedmen who were part of larger households, in order to understand how different relationships shaped and structured interactions in Roman society. Together, we will explore the following questions: how were relationships and bonds represented in the ancient world? What structures were in place for families to perpetuate themselves through biological or adoptive means? How could non-Roman citizens create family connections through formal and informal channels? How could relationships be celebrated in life and commemorated in death? We will use written evidence from ancient historians, visual evidence like the Altar of Peace, and archaeological evidence from cemeteries to examine how Roman notions of kinship shaped life and death in different social milieu.

Designed to prepare graduates in any aspect of study in the ancient world to prepare for the dissertation prospectus. Course will be centered around individual presentations and group critique of prospectus' in process, as well the fundamentals of large-project research design and presentation.

This course introduces students to theory and methodology of the geospatial humanities and social sciences, understood broadly as the application of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis techniques to the study of social and cultural patterns in the past and present. By engaging with spatial theory, spatial analysis case studies, and technical methodologies, students will develop an understanding of the questions driving, and tools available for, humanistic and social science research projects that explore change over space and time. We will use ESRI's ArcGIS software to visualize, analyze, and integrate historical, anthropological, and environmental data. Techniques will be introduced through the discussion of case studies and through demonstration of software skills. During supervised laboratory sessions, the various techniques and analyses covered will be applied to sample data and also to data from a region/topic chosen by the student.

An introductory survey, this course investigates painting, sculpture, and the "minor arts" of the Middle Ages. Students will become familiar with selected major monuments of the Late Antique, Byzantine, Carolingian, Romanesque, and Gothic periods, as well as primary textual sources. Analysis of works emphasizes the cultural context, the thematic content, and the function of objects. Discussions focus especially on several key themes: the aesthetic status of art and the theological role of images; the revival of classical models and visual modes; social rituals such as pilgrimage and crusading; the cult of the Virgin and the status of women in art; and, more generally, the ideology of visual culture across the political and urban landscapes.

Introduction to the art of building and city planning in the ancient Greek world, 7th-1st c. BC. Emphasis on concepts of organizing space, on issues of structure, materials, decoration, proportion, and the Mycenean and eastern heritage as well as on theory and practice of urbanism as reflected in ancient cities (Athens, Pergamon, Alexandria) and writings (Plato, Artistotle, and others). Excursions to the Penn Museum and Philadelphia. No prerequisites.

This course surveys the political, religious and domestic arts, patronage and display in Rome's Mediterranean, from the 2nd c. BCE to Constantine's 4th-c. Christianized empire. Our subjects are images and decorated objects in their cultural, political and socio-economic contexts (painting, mosaic, sculpture, luxury and mass-produced arts in many media). We start with the Hellenistic cosmopolitan culture of the Greek kingdoms and their neighbors, and late Etruscan and Republican Italy; next we map Imperial Roman art as developed around the capital city Rome, as well as in the provinces of the vast empire.

Pastoral nomadism is a "third way" of human subsistence separate from farming and foraging. It is a sustainable human adaptation to grassland and arid environments practiced through particular technologies and domesticated animals. This course begins by examining the human ecology and social organization that emerge from mobile ways of life, drawing on modern, ethnographic, and archaeological examples of pastoral nomadic groups in the Middle East and Central Asia. Academic readings and ethnographic films will form the basis of discussions about several larger themes, including: the origins of pastoral nomadism and horse riding; the development of dairy-based foods and human adaptations allowing the digestion of lactose; the historical relationship between mobile groups of pastoralists and territorial states; popular perceptions of nomads in various forms of historical and modern media; and the influence of ideas about nomads on modern senses of heritage and nationalism in the Middle East and Central Asia.

An interdisciplinary seminar focusing on the city of Troy both as an archaeological site and as the setting of the legendary Trojan War. We will consider Homer's Iliad (with selected sections read in Greek) together with the topography and archaeology of the site of Troy in order to address a series of interrelated questions: What are the points of continuity and discontinuity between the stories told by the literary tradition and the material record? How do both types of evidence contribute to our understanding of political relations and cultural interactions between Greece and Anatolia in the Bronze Age? How do Hittite sources bear on our reconstruction of the events behind the Troy legend? How have the site and the poem contributed to each other's interpretation in the context of scholarly discovery and debate? We will give some attention to modern receptions of the Troy legend that deliberately combine material and textual elements, such as Cy Twombly's "Fifty Days at Iliam" and Alice Oswald's "Memorial: An Excavation of Homer's Iliad." The seminar will include a visit to the site of Troy during the Spring Break.

Near-surface geophysical prospection methods are now widely used in archaeology as they allow archaeologists to rapidly map broad areas, minimize or avoid destructive excavation, and perceive physical dimensions of archaeological features that are outside of the range of human perception. This course will cover the theory of geophysical sensors commonly used in archaeological investigations and the methods for collecting, processing, and interpreting geophysical data from archaeological contexts. We will review the physical properties of common archaeological and paleoenvironmental targets, the processes that led to their deposition and formation, and how human activity is reflected in anomalies recorded through geophysical survey through lectures, readings, and discussion. Students will gain experience collecting data in the field with various sensors at archaeological sites in the region. A large proportion of the course will be computer-based as students work with data from geophysical sensors, focusing on the fundamentals of data processing, data fusion, and interpretation. Some familiarity with GIS is recommended.

This course is designed to provide an in-depth analysis of archaeological metals. Topics to be discussed include: exploitation of ore and its transformation to metal in ancient times, distribution of metal as a raw materials, provenance studies, development and organization of early metallurgy, and interdisciplinary investigations of metals and related artifacts like slag and crucibles. Students will become familiar with the full spectrum of analytical procedures, ranging from microscopy for materials characterization to mass spectrometry for geochemical fingerprinting, and will work on individual research projects analyzing archaeological objects following the analytical methodology of archaeometallurgy.