Semester:
Offered:
Rowan Flad (Department of Anthropology)
First-Year Seminar 73E 4 credits (Fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Note: There will be required trips to museums during the course of the term.
How is our understanding of the past, and of scientific discovery in general, determined or framed by the concerns of the present? How does popular media cover scientific research about the past? How do ingrained social biases affect this media coverage? This seminar considers these questions through a focus on Ancient East Asia. In the process, we learn about the origins of the people, cultures, and civilizations of this region, but our primary focus is not historic details, but instead examining how the varied and complicated histories and relationships among people and societies in the modern Nation-States of China, Korea, Japan and other nearby countries are understood through archaeological practice in the present. In particular, we will focus on the media coverage of archaeological finds and investigate how well popular media coverage aligns with the scientific results that are discussed by researchers.