Taught by Susan Foster McCarter
Johns Hopkins University
Ph.D., Brandeis University

Have you ever found yourself, perhaps after visiting a museum, an art gallery, or a historic site,
wanting to know more about a long-lost civilization, a fortress that was bitterly fought over ages ago,
or a ruined city sitting mute but poignant in the midst of what was once a thriving human world but is
now a trackless jungle or a lonely plain?

If such experiences have gripped your imagination, then you have probably also wondered how, more generally,
groups of human beings dealt at different times and places with the challenges of their environments, and
how, in turn, the environment shaped past peoples across the unchronicled millennia of human prehistory.

Writing was invented only about 5,000 years ago. Since scientists can trace humanity's origins back 500
times as far?to almost 2.5 million years ago?sometimes the desire to explore questions like these cannot
be satisfied by the pages of written history. The place for you to turn, as this course will show, is to
archaeology.

Part meticulous empirical science and part inspired detective work, archaeology seeks answers about the
obscure reaches of the past by using techniques and insights from a wealth of other fields, including
geology, anthropology, history, physics, art history, and even philosophy?along with long hours in the
field studying the physical traces that our forebears have left behind.

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