Shannon Lee Dawdy

21225 Intensive Study of a Culture: Louisiana. Louisiana is home to Cajun music, Creole food, and the Yat dialect, as well as some of the most impressive prehistoric mound sites in North America. Louisiana is often figured as a cultural exception within the United States, although the branding of authentic Louisiana through 'heritage tourism' and exported commodities such as "Dixieland Jazz" and "Popeye's Cajun Chicken" tends to obscure local distinctions. This course offers an archaeological, historical, and ethnographic introduction to Louisiana 's complex culture. We will focus particularly on the ways in which race, ethnicity, and identity are constructed within and about Louisiana.

21254. Intensive Study of a Culture: Pirates. Pirates, smugglers, and privateers hold a special place in the American cultural imagination, particularly in recent years.  But the value of studying piracy and smuggling goes beyond the titillation of popular entertainment in forms such as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean.  Many of the questions that arise go to the heart of major anthropological problems.  Some of these topics are venerable, others are of more recent vintage, such as:  the nature of informal economies, the relationship between criminality and the state, transnationalism, the evolution of capitalism, intellectual property and globalization, political revolutions, counter-cultures, and the cultural role of heroic (or anti-heroic) narratives.  Each week we will tackle one of these topics, pairing a classic anthropological work with specific examples from the historical, archaeological, and/or ethnographic literature.  While the pirates and smugglers of the early modern Caribbean (ca. 1492-1820) will serve as our primary case study, we will be comparing this well-known form to examples spanning from ancient ship-raiders in the Mediterranean to contemporary software "piracy."

26600/48600. Artifacts of Modernity. This is an intensive methods course which serves as an introduction to the material culture of the modern era (post 1450). Course readings and seminar discussions will address the production, consumption, distribution, and meaning of artifacts within the context of colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and mass consumption. Laboratory lectures and exercises will focus on the identification and analysis of different artifact classes such as ceramics, container glass, architectural materials, industrial by-products, pipe stems, weapons, buttons, doll heads, etc. Students will receive hands-on training with recently excavated materials. Course meetings will be split between seminar and lab.

29500/59500.  Archaeology Lab Practicum  (PQ Only w/ Consent of Instructor) This is a hands-on lab practicum course in which students will be exposed to various stages of artifact processing on a collection from a recently excavated site, including: washing, sorting, flotation, identification, data entry, analysis, report preparation and curation.  The primary requirement is that students commit to a minimum of 9 hours of lab work per week, with tasks assigned according to immediate project needs.  In addition, undergraduates will be required to submit a final writing assignment researching one artifact (or group of related artifacts) while graduate students will be required to make a specific contribution to the project report, as assigned by the instructor.

36700: Archaeology of Race and Ethnicity. How can we tell whether material differences in the archaeological record correspond to boundaries human groups draw between themselves? This question lays bear the heart of the problem of archaeological inference, which has cycled through several controversies in the discipline.  We will review these debates and pursue related questions, such as: Can we see ethnic diversity or ethnogenesis in the archaeological record? Can race be constructed through artifacts?  Did race exist in prehistory or antiquity?  What are the political stakes involved in archaeological studies of race and ethnicity? Over the last several years, a new emphasis on the social construction of racial and ethnic identities has invited a re-examination of the ways in which aspects of the material world (architecture, pottery, food, clothing, etc.) may participate actively in the dialectical process of creating or obscuring difference, suggesting both new avenues of research and new problems to confront in a topic that remains highly relevant to today's society.

48400: Fieldwork in the Archives. This is a methods seminar designed for both archaeology and sociocultural graduate students interested in, or already working with, archival materials and original texts. The goal of the course is to develop a tool-kit of epistemological questions and methodological approaches that can aid in understanding how archives are formed, the purposes they serve, their relation to the culture and topic under study, as well as how to search archives effectively and read documents critically. We will survey different types of documents and archives often encountered in fieldwork, and sample approaches taken by historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists from contexts as diverse as the ancient Near East to 1970's Cuba. This seminar will also be driven by the problems and examples that students bring to the discussion. A major outcome will be a research paper that uses original documents from the student's own fieldwork or from locally available archive sources identified during the course.

56912. Text/Artifact: Advanced reading seminar in archaeology. This is a student-initiated reading seminar exploring the epistemological roles of texts and artifacts in archaeological work. The themes we will explore relate to a conference to be held on campus on May 18, however students need not be participants in the conference to enroll. The questions we will consider (taken from the collaboratively written abstract) include: "How does the nature of our evidence shape the questions we ask and the methods we use to answer them? In what ways are these forms of evidence combined, juxtaposed, and contrasted? Is it useful to read texts as artifacts, artifacts as texts, and what does this entail? What are the paradigms for approaching hybrid forms of text, object, and image? How do we treat those geographical and temporal contexts that lie somewhere between prehistory and history? Do our sources and practices inscribe boundaries or inspire collaborations between the disciplines? How do the conditions of our specialties as Andeanists, Egyptologists, Modernists, etc., inform comparison, or even envy and longing for the evidence of the other?"
Each student will be responsible for designing a small section of the syllabus around a question that interests them, or to share problems taken from their own field of research. Reading selections will also include monographs written by invited speakers. This will be a readings-heavy course with no final writing requirement, although students giving papers at the conference will have an opportunity to workshop their papers in this setting.