Academics

Courses of Interest to Scientific Explorers of the Human Past

Fall Semester 2025:

Gen Ed 1105: Can We Know Our Past?

Jason Ur

Rowan Flad

In a time when histories are being contested, monuments removed, and alternative facts compete with established orthodoxy, how do we evaluate competing narratives about what really happened in the past?

What happened in the past? How do you know? Even though today we take great pains to document every major event that occurs, more than 99% of human history is not written down. How, then, can we determine with any certainty what people did, let alone thought about, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years ago? This course addresses these and other fundamental questions: Can we ever really know what happened in the past? If the past is “dead and gone,” how do we know what we (think we) know about it? And what is our degree of certainty about the past societies and cultures that historians, archaeologists and others study today? Through hands-on interaction with artifacts, experiments and other analytical methods you will consider how these approaches relate to different “stakeholders” – groups of people whose understanding of themselves is rooted in a connection to history. By the end of this course, you will have a sense of how your knowledge of the seemingly-distant past is, in fact, intimately tied to your experiences in the contemporary world.

Spring Semester 2025:

HIST 1973: Re-Wilding Harvard

W 12:45 pm – 2:45 pm

Joyce Chaplin

This class uses history to make a difference in the natural world. Rewilding returns a habitat to an earlier form to promote biodiversity; urban rewilding does this within urban spaces. In this class, we will research historical and cultural definitions of wilderness and landscape, identify what precolonialist habitats were like in New England, survey how such places might be restored, and then contribute to a ten-year urban rewilding plan for Harvard, including an outdoor exhibit for the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and a GIS reconstruction of Harvard’s landscape history. The class is open to both graduate students and undergraduates in a broad and relevant range of disciplines and will fulfill conference course credit in the History Department.

ANTHRO 1038: Game of Stones: The Archaeology of Europe from Handaxes to Stonehenge

Th 9-11:45am

Profs. Amy Clark and Joe Henrich

Jointly offered as HEB 181

Game of Stones: The Archaeology of Europe from Handaxes to Stonehenge Buried beneath modern cities, Roman amphitheaters, and Medieval churches lie subtle traces of Europe’s earlier occupants: campsites littered stone tools and animal bones, human bodies preserved in bogs and frozen in ice, and cave walls decorated with extinct animals. This course will explore European prehistory from the first settlement of Europe by Homo erectus, around a million years ago, to the building of Stonehenge, c. 2000 B.C. We will cover some of those most exciting topics in archaeology today: How similar were Neanderthals to us and why did they go extinct? When and why did groups subsisting on hunting and gathering take up farming? And finally, for what purpose were large stone monuments such as Stonehenge and Newgrange built?

HEB 1326: Ancient DNA as a Window Into the Human Past

M and W 9:00 – 10:15 am

David Reich

Over the last decade, ancient DNA technology has made it possible to ask and answer questions that were impossible to address before, and the findings that have emerged are challenging and enriching previous understandings of the past. This course will provide students with the tools they need to critically evaluate and perform research on ancient DNA. The centerpiece of the course is analyzing unpublished data produced by the instructor’s lab under the mentorship of members of the instructor’s laboratory, leading to a final project in which students will write an original research paper based on their analysis of data. The course will include lectures aimed at providing students with an understanding of major issues in this field, seminar-style discussions critically assessing papers and student research projects, and four homework assignments that will provide students with the core computational skills they need to analyze data. This course will be of interest for students in Human Evolutionary Biology, Computer Science, Statistics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and History. This course is aimed at providing deep disciplinary knowledge in Ancient DNA research and as such could be a jumping-off point for students who wish to do an Honors Senior Thesis in this area or carry out Ph.D. thesis research in Ancient DNA.

HEB 160: Human Genetic Variation
MW 1030am - 1145am
Éadaoin Harney
The genomes of all humans are approximately 99.5% identical, however powerful insights can be made about
human population history and health by examining the remaining 0.5% of the genome in which humans vary. In
this course, students will be introduced to concepts in human population genetics, with the aim of enabling them
to understand and critically assess recent publications in the field. This is a lecture-based course involving
problem sets, tests, and writing assignments.

Spring Semester 2024:

HIST 1056: The New Science of the Human Past: Case Studies at the Cutting Edge

MW 12:00-1:15pm

Prof. Michael McCormick

Who are we? Where do we come from? What has 23andme got to do with History? Ice Cores? Data Science?

Science is powering History into a revolutionary age of discovery. We will learn how ancient DNA reveals our ancestors’ migrations out of Africa and across the globe and recovers ancient pathogens and their impact from Rome to the Black Death and 16^th-century Mexico; how paleoclimate science reconstructs ancient environments from natural proxies (ice cores) and historical records; and how IT changes everything from shipwrecks to Roman coins, via medieval manuscripts. We’ll explore the new archaeoscience as the discoveries unfold by reading, discussing, and doing, from ancient genomes to tree rings, from Roman coins to ancient pots, and more.

This course will feature lots of hands-on learning as we make field trips to Harvard’s magnificent Arboretum to core trees and analyze their testimony, to the University Ceramic Studio to throw Roman pots, to the Museum to handle Roman gold coins. The leaders of today’s discoveries will share with us their career experiences in class, and you will have lunch with them at our expense: you’ll get sneak peeks into new discoveries as they happen!

Anthro 1270 - Sick: 10,000 Years of Health and Disease

M W 3-4:15pm

Prof. Christina Warinner

This course surveys the concept of health and the major nutritional and infectious diseases that have impacted human populations over the past ten thousand years. Special attention is paid to the methods used to detect and identify disease in the past, including skeletal paleopathology, paleodemography, and pathogenomics, as well as human social factors that have influenced human disease exposure and susceptibility, including long-distance migration, agriculture and pastoralism, urbanization, and industrialization.

ANTHRO 1026: Archaeology in the Museum: Assemblage Analysis of a Peabody Museum Collection

W 3:00 – 5:45 pm

Sarah Hlubik

In this course, we will analyze one of the collections from the Peabody Museum. This analysis will include basic assemblage analysis (what is in the collection), artifact measurement and classification, 3D scanning of representative pieces of the collection, and research on the site itself. Analysis may include non-destructive microarchaeological analysis and investigation of higher-level analysis.

ANTHRO 1038: Game of Stones: The Archaeology of Europe from Handaxes to Stonehenge

M and W 1:30 pm – 2:45 pm

Amy Clark

Previous Semesters

ANTHRO 1080: American History Before Columbus

Matt Liebmann

What happened in America before 1492? What were the major turning points in Native American history? Why don't we know more about the ancient history of North America? Anthropology 1080 answers these questions by introducing you to the discipline of North American archaeology. This lecture course will help you to understand how Native American societies developed in the millennia before the European invasion, why American Indian peoples live where they do today, and how their dynamic populations have changed over the course of the past 15,000 years. In the process you’ll have the opportunity to examine a truly world-class collection of artifacts from the Peabody Museum, allowing you to hold the remains of American history in your own hands and investigate the past with your own eyes.

ANTHRO 1131: Archaeology of Harvard Yard II: Laboratory Methods and Analysis

Diana Loren and Patricia Capone

Open to students who participated in the fall term investigations in Harvard Yard, this course focuses on the detailed analysis of the materials recovered in the excavations, within the context of archival and comparative archaeological and historical research. The analysis will also include an evaluation of the results of the ground-penetrating radar surveys conducted prior to the excavations, as part of the research design for the next season of investigations of the Indian College site.

ANTHRO 1179: Rise of the Sun and Gold Empire: Archaeology of the Central Andes

Solsire Cusicanqui Marsano

The Central Andes is one of the six cultural areas in the world in which "civilization" arose independently, with a history that began more than 10,000 years ago and ended with the Inka Empire. Complex political and economic formations of a state nature emerged as a result of particular historical and social processes in a rich and varied geography. Social events and accomplishments—such as the alteration of landscapes, the domestication of animals and plants, the beginning of the first temples, the development of ancient urbanism, the construction of roads, pottery and metallurgy technologies, among others—will be discussed as we examine the evolution of these societies. The class will combine theoretical and hands-on work analyzing cultural artifacts from the Peabody Museum Collection. The relationship between pre-Hispanic cultures and the traditions that persist to the present day will also be covered in this course. In this way, it seeks to provide students with a critical, updated, and multidisciplinary view of the region's history. The invitation of specialists in the topics is proposed, and the class ends with a tasting of Peruvian cuisine that includes the different ancestral foods and their cultural significance.

ANTHRO 1183: People of the Sun: The Archaeology of Ancient Mexico

Bill Fash

This course provides a broad overview of the archaeology of ancient Mexico and Central America, focusing on the Indigenous cultures of highland Mexico such as the Aztecs and Zapotecs, as well as their predecessors and contemporary descendants. Topics include the origins of food production and early cuisine; development of regional exchange networks; rise of towns, temples, and urbanism; emergence of states and empires; and resilience of Indigenous lifeways through conquest and colonial periods. Peabody Museum collections are incorporated into class discussions and assignments.

ANTHRO 2020: GIS & Spatial Analysis In Archaeology

Jason Ur

An introduction to the GIS and remote sensing methods used by archaeologists to document and analyze datasets at the scale of the site and the region. This class will involve the hands-on use of printed maps, aerial photography, satellite imagery, digital terrain models, GPS-based observations, and UAV (drone) photogrammetry to approach archaeological research questions. Students will gain competence in creating spatial data for fieldwork, print publication, and online visualization (web maps and 3D modeling), and in basic spatial analysis of archaeological datasets. Labs will use data from the instructor’s Middle Eastern case studies, but students will be responsible for assembling a GIS database for their own region of interest.

CLASARCH 163: The Polychromy of Ancient Sculpture

Adrian Staehli

Statues in marble and bronze count among the most prominent artworks that survived from Greek and Roman antiquity. Since the first discoveries of classical sculptures in the Renaissance, ancient statues not only served as paragons for the perfect, idealized representation of the human body, they also largely coined the conventions of the visual appearance and materiality of contemporary sculpture: the whiteness of marble and the dark surface of bronze became the standards of statuary representation in modern art, and that didn’t change until very recently, despite the fact that the original polychromy of ancient sculpture was discovered already in the 18th century and had been widely discussed throughout the 19th century. It is only in recent years that we learn through new investigation methods about the color traces of classical sculptures and are able to reconstruct their original polychromy. The seminar investigates the current state of art of the evidence for the coloring of ancient sculpture, examines recent reconstructions of the polychromy of ancient marble and bronze statues, studies the semantics of color of hair, skin, and flesh in antiquity, provides an overview of the reception of classical sculpture in modern art, but also the impact of modern sculpture and aesthetic theories on the perception of classical statues, and reconstructs the historiography of the discovery and the scholarship on ancient polychromy, including its broad popular reception in the 19th century.

CLS-STDY 154: Ancient Global Economies

Irene Soto Marin

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the complex and sophisticated nature of ancient economies, with a particular focus on the global connections of well-known ancient polities such as the Assyrian, Egyptian, Macedonian, Roman, and Palmyrene Empires. In this class students will learn how to dissect historical and analytical narratives that utilize quantitative and qualitative data sets through case studies, e.g. the economic logistics of the military conquests of Alexander, the constructions of the pyramids of Old Kingdom Egypt, the price of urban development of the city of Rome, and the capital investment required for the long-distance trade along the Silk Roads and Indo-Roman trade routes. Given the broad historical span that the class will cover, we will be treating different economic aspects of ancient civilizations as case studies to explore the ways in which their economies spanned beyond their immediate local geographies. The course will also explore how current economic theories (such as New Institutional Economics, Market Integration, and even Behavioral Economics and Transaction Costs Theory) are helping to understand the nature of economies in the ancient world. Questions of economic integration, natural resources, luxury trade, capital, taxation, investment, and loans, will be featured. The economic data used for our analyses and study will be obtained from the textual record (composed of papyri, inscriptions, and historical texts) and the archaeological record (composed of coins, ceramics, urban and domestic archaeological remains, and even preserved organic material).

E-PSCI 139: Paleoclimate as Prologue

Peter Huybers

This course we will quantitatively assess past events in Earth's history involving temperature, precipitation, and sea level, and leverage these past phenomena to inform about future changes in climate. Topics include inferring temperature from instrumental, dendrochronological, ice-core, and marine proxy records over the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, and post-industrial epochs; exploring variations in sea level recorded by tide gages and coral records over the Holocene and Last Interglacial; assessing precipitation variability using modern instrumental records and late-Pleistocene lake level and speleothem records; and evaluating changes in mountain glaciers and ice sheets over the Plio-Pleistocene. Statistical approaches paired with these analyses include Bayesian inference, Fourier analysis, quantile regression, and extreme value theory. You will be provided with data, example code, and sufficient context to come to your own conclusions regarding past phenomena and how they inform regarding future warming, drought, and changes in sea level. A typical class session involves discussion of a scientific paper, lecture introducing relevant theory and analytical approaches, hands-on data analysis, and a brief interview with an outside expert. A complimentary component of the course involves you individually, or in a small team, developing a line of research in collaboration with the teaching staff. Your research will extend upon class topics or related paleoclimate questions. Student projects sometimes lead to senior theses and publication in professional journals. There are no firm prerequisites but background in the sciences, mathematics, statistics, and/or coding is helpful.

GENED 1027: Human Evolution and Human Health

Daniel Lieberman and Bridget Alex

How and why did humans evolve to be the way we are, and what are the implications of our evolved anatomy and physiology for human health today? How can we use principles of evolution to promote health and prevent disease? To address these questions, this course reviews the major transitions that occurred in human evolution, from the divergence of the ape and human lineages some 8 million years ago to the origins of Homo sapiens about 300,000 years ago. We also consider the many health effects of the recent cultural and technological transitions from hunting and gathering to farming and then to industrialization.

HEB 1290: Genes, Mind, and Culture

Joseph Henrich

Humans are a cultural species. Unlike other species, we are heavily reliant on learning from others to acquire many important aspects of our behavior, and this capacity for cultural transmission has given rise to a second system of inheritance that not only explains much of our contemporary behavior but has driven our species’ genetic evolution over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. Humans are products of culture-gene coevolution. In addition to having shaped our species’ anatomy and physiology, cultural evolution has important implications for understanding human nature, and for tackling basic problems and questions in psychology, economics and anthropology. In this class, we will focus on the origins and evolution of human culture using evidence from archaeology, human evolutionary biology, physical anthropology, and related fields. We will investigate how our hominin ancestors acquired and passed down a wealth of accumulated knowledge, such as technologies for hunting and collecting foodstuffs, the medicinal uses of plants, the control and manipulation of fire, and how to identify a distant group member. How did the accumulation of such information change over time and within different hominin groups (such as Neanderthals)? And how can we use the archaeological record and inferences made from human evolutionary biology to answer these questions?

HEB 1326: Ancient DNA as a Window Into the Human Past

David Reich

HEB 1398: Human Genetic Variation

Eadaoin Harneya

The genomes of all humans are approximately 99.5% identical, however powerful insights can be made about human population history and health by examining the remaining 0.5% of the genome in which humans vary. In this course, students will be introduced to concepts in human population genetics, with the aim of enabling them to understand and critically assess recent publications in the field. This is a lecture-based course involving problem sets, tests, and writing assignments.

HIST 1039: First Empires: Power and Propaganda in the Ancient World

Gabe Pizzorno

This course traces the continuum of socio-political and cultural developments in the Near East that led, over the course of three millennia, from stateless societies to the emergence of Assyria as the first empire in history. The class focuses on the long-term history of power centralisation, and the role of ideology and propaganda in overcoming resistance to this concentration of authority. The course material covers a broad evidentiary and chronological range. We will employ textual, visual, and archaeological sources to explore the evolution of the political and cultural landscape in the Near East and the Mediterranean, from the emergence of the first city-states in the late fourth millennium BCE to the early development of Roman imperial ideology around the start of the Common Era.

HIST 1700: The History of Sub-Saharan Africa to 1860

Emmanuel Akyeampong

Survey of sub-Saharan Africa to 1860, with attention to the range of methodologies used in writing early African history, including oral history, archaeology, and anthropology. Will address themes of the impact of climate change on migration and settlement, trade and commerce, state formation, slavery, and the impact of Islam and Christianity on the continent. Will provide a methodological and historiographical framework in which more specific historical processes and events may be placed and understood.

HIST 1973: Re-Wilding Harvard

Joyce Chaplin

HIST 2056: Reading in Late Antique and Medieval History: Seminar

Michael McCormick

A critical introduction to and group discussion of special themes in the historiography of late antique and medieval history with readings in English and French or German, culminating in a term paper. Themes will range from transdisciplinary approaches to history to “is there a Mediterranean history”? An individualized focus on the Science of the Human Past is possible (including, for example, historical ice cores, ancient pandemics or other topics continuing work in History 1056).