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.

212xx. Intensive Study of a Culture: Ports and Pirates of the Caribbean. Pirates have recently become popular not just with the movie-going public but with scholars who are coming to realize the significant role they played, along with smugglers, privateers, and more legitimate entrepreneurs, in helping to create the "Atlantic World." Many Caribbean sailors and traders (typically a multi-racial and multi-lingual lot) proclaimed themselves to be "nationless" and "masterless" as they wove a social and economic web among port towns in South Carolina, Cuba, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, and many small islands in between. One aim of this course will be to draw an anthropological and archaeological portrait of maritime society in the Caribbean of the 16th-19th centuries. Another central aim will be to familiarize students with by-now classic approaches to the region such as world systems theory and modes of comparative colonialism. Bringing these together, we will consider whether it is possible to conceive of a "nationless" or "masterless" culture in anthropological terms and what a full consideration of 'ports and pirates' might do to our understandings of capitalism, revolution, and even culture itself.

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.

36700: Archaeology of Race and Ethnicity. How do we 'see' ethnic diversity in the archaeological record? How does long-distance trade or mass consumption affect local material identities? Can 'race' be constructed through artifacts? The correlation between ethnic groups and patterns in material culture lies at the heart of many archaeological problems. For example, the archaeological terms Phase, Horizon, and Tradition are meant to distinguish different artifactual complexes across time and space, but they are often taken to be a passive index of cultural or ethnic groups – in other words, that each self-identified group left a unique archaeological trace, or that each significant shift in material culture reflects a meaningful ethnic boundary. 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) may participate actively in the dialectical process of creating or obscuring difference. This seminar will survey historical debates and engage with current theoretical discussions within archaeology concerning race and ethnicity in complex societies. S. Dawdy. Win’05.

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.