Gen Ed 1105: Can We Know Our Past?

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2021

What happened in the past, and if and how we should remember it, is hotly contested. Even though today we take great pains to document every major event that occurs, more than 99% of human history is not written down. How then can we determine with any certainty what people did, let alone thought about, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years ago? This course addresses these and other fundamental questions: Can we ever really know what happened in the past?  If the past is “dead and gone,” how do we know what we think we know about it?  And what is our degree of certainty about the past societies and cultures that historians, archaeologists and others study today? Whose past matters? And how should we remember it?

Because so much of the human past happened in prehistory, this course will emphasize material remains, which are studied primarily by the tools of archaeology. We will start with basic questions such as what's left of the past? How do we find these remains, and how can we know how old they are?  We will move on to larger questions of moving from artifacts to systems of meaning and belief. The course will expose you to the basic methods of data recovery and analysis employed by modern archaeological research.

For the second half of the course, students will explore how the past is created in, and sometimes for, the present.  We will consider how history and archaeology have been used to advance imperial and colonial agendas, and how independent nations have used the same tools to create their own postcolonial identities.