PDF's for the readings can be found here: [link]
Week One (9/9-9/11): Things: An Introduction
- Aims and objectives
- Approaches to things
- Create a personal wiki page
Week Two (9/14-9/18): The Wheel
- Bulliet, R.W. 1990 [1975]: The camel and the wheel. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. e-book (on campus access only)
- Latour, B. 1994. 'Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties'. The American Behavioral Scientist 37: 791-808.
Week Three (9/21-9/25): a Neolithic megalith
Week Four (9/28-10/2): the castle
- Johnson, M. 2002. Behind the castle gate: from medieval to Renaissance. London: Routledge.
- Tara Controversy [link]
- Tara Watch [link]
Everyone must select a thing for the project by Friday, October 2
Week Five (10/5-10/9): A blade (including a detour through several million years of human evolution!)
- Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Cambridge: The MIT Press. (Selections TBA)
- Wynn, T. 1985. Piaget, tools and the evolution of human intelligence. World Archaeology 17, 32-43.
Week Six (10/12-10/16): a Porcelain punch bowl (No class Monday!)
- Robert Finlay, "The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History," Journal of World History, v.9, n.2 (Fall 1998): 141-87
- David Porter, "Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy" in Ideographia: The Chinese Cypher in Early Modern Europe, Stanford University Press, 2001, 133-92.
scheduling note: Wednesday - exhibit discussion; Friday - guest lecture, Caroline Frank
Project Proposal due Friday, October 16
Week Seven (10/19-10/23): a map
- Latour, B. 1986: Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands, in H. Kuklick, and E. Long (eds), Knowledge and society. Studies in the sociology of culture past and present Vol. 6, 1-40.
- Turnbull, D. 1994: Maps are territories. Science is an atlas. The University of Chicago Press.
- Witmore C. 2004: On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece. Archaeological Dialogues, 11(2):133-164.
Week Eight (10/26-10/30): The Bottle
- Miller, D. 2002: Coca-Cola: a black sweet drink from Trinidad, in V. Buchli (ed), The Material Culture Reader. Berg, London.
- Nash, J. 2007: Consuming Interests: Water, Rum, and Coca-Cola from Ritual Propritiation to Corporate Expropriation in Highland Chiapas, Cultural Anthropology
- Torbenson, M. et al. 2000: Lash's: A Bitter Medicine: Biochemical Analysis of an Historical Proprietary Medicine, Historical Archaeology
- Larsen, E. 1994: A Boardinghouse Madonna - Beyond the Aesthetics of a Portrait Created Through Medicine Bottles, Historical Archaeology
Week Nine (11/2-11/6): barbed wire
- Netz R. 2004. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Wesleyan University Press.
Week Ten (11/9-11/13): the light bulb
- Hughes, T.P. 1983. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880-1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reading Assignments TBA
- Hughes, T.P. 1985. 'Edison and electric light' in Mackenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (eds.) The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Got Its Hum. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Week Eleven (11/16-11/20): the portable radio
- Schiffer, M. 1991. The Portable Radio in American Life. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (Selections TBA)
- Sterne, J. 2002. The Audible Past. The Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press. (Selections TBA)
Week Twelve (11/23-11/25): the caravel (Thanksgiving Recess: 11am on 11/25-11/29)
- Law, J. 2001 (1987). Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion. In W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch (eds), The Social Construction of Technological Systems. MIT Press.
Week Thirteen (11/30 - 12/4): the mirror & the camera (a two-thing week!)
- Manovich, L. 2006: Visual technologies as cognitive prostheses: A short history of the externalization of the mind. In M. Smith and J. Morra (ed.) The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman to a Biocultural Future, The MIT Press.
- Crary, J. 1992: Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. The MIT Press.
- Baudrillard, J. 1967/1996: The System of Objects (section on mirrors), London/Verso
- Fry, William 1980: A Gift of Mirrors: An Essay in Psychological Evolution, North American Review, December.
Week Fourteen: Final Project Presentations / Exhibitions (12/7-12/11)
Final projects due: Friday December 11
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