Survey and partial excavation of one or more historic sites in Louisa County. Depending on the results of this research, we will continue work on this site or will begin archaeological testing of the yards around several standing historic houses in the area. This course will critically analyze selected recent contributions to anthropological theory and seek to contextualize these contributions in the history of the discipline. Students will be expected to make presentations and participate actively in critiquing the readings. We will try to figure out the phonological and grammatical structure of the language entirely on the basis of data collected from the language consultant in class.
Attendance is therefore mandatory.
This course will consider the relationship between the development of ethnological theory and the way archaeologists have used their data. Beginning with Lewis Henry Morgan in the second half of the nineteenth century, the course will proceed to consider the effect on archaeological thought of the work of such scholars as Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, Leslie White, Julian Steward, Clyde Kluckhohn, Claude Levi-Strauss, Henry Glassie, and others. Special attention will be paid to one archaeologist, Walter Taylor. We will begin by questioning the fundamental assumptions usually brought to these problems by reviewing the history of the debate over incest and the incest taboo. Readings will be drawn from Freud, Westermarck, Levi-Strauss, and A.P. Wolf, among others.