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.

This course is designed to build skills of analysis and argumentation essential to the conduct of creative and responsible work in History of Art. Its goals include presenting the history of the field in a manner attentive to the complexities of its institutional and professional formations, purposes, and effects; encouraging appreciation of historiography, specifically the time, place, and political and social circumstances in which a given text was composed; promoting awareness of the ethics of scholarship (inclusive and expansive in every sense); familiarizing students with the strengths and weaknesses of distinct methodological traditions that have shaped the field; considering the audiences served by art historical scholarship (the academy, the museum, local and global publics) and the forms scholarship might take to effectively reach those audiences. The course is required for first-year graduate students in History of Art and open to others with permission of the instructor.

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 surveys Greek art and artifacts from Sicily to the Black Sea from the 10th century BCE to the 2nd century BCE, including the age of Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms. Public sculpture and painting on and around grand buildings and gardens, domestic luxury arts of jewelry, cups and vases, mosaic floors, and cult artefacts are discussed. Also considered are the ways in which heroic epic, religious and political themes are used to engaged viewers' emotions and served both domestic and the public aims. We discuss the relationships of images and things to space and structure, along with ideas of invention and progress, and the role of monuments, makers and patrons in Greek society.

This course will be an introduction to the art, architecture and minor arts that were produced during the three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history. This material will be presented in its cultural and historical contexts through illustrated lectures and will include visits to the collection of the University Museum.

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.

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.