Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.
These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of [...]

Two great new anthropology classes

MMW1 Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed), Tara Carter, UC San Diego.
UCSD is presenting three different versions of this course, but Carter’s is my hands-down favorite. She relates the story of hominid evolution and the birth of social organization with infectious enthusiasm. So far the course has brought us up to the [...]

Taming technology

What should we do when a technology might be spreading too fast? Consider nano-silver, an antimicrobial compound that some fear might be damaging to many kinds of living cells. What happens if nano-silver gets into our waterways and oceans before regulators have time to examine it?
Or think about this: what do we do when technology [...]

Introduction to Biological Anthropology

UC Berkeley neurobiologist Terrence Deacon gives a rousing grand finale to his spring 2009 course Introduction to Biological Anthropology (website, feed).
The final three lectures explore the ways that our bodies and minds have been shaped by evolution, sometimes in ways that leave us poorly prepared for the artificial environments in which we now live.
He’s not [...]

Book tour sightings

Recent book tour sightings on the net:
Jewish Book Week 2009
The 2009 Jewish book week is now online (website, iTunes), with lots of book news and conversations with literati and assorted pundits. Some good bets:

American Fervour (website) Columbia University historian Simon Schama talks about the role of religion in US history.
Rhyming Life and Death (website) You [...]

Say hello to your cousin — the yeast!

Among the weird and wonderful factiods in Terrence Deacon’s UC Berkeley course Introduction to Biological Anthropology (website, feed) is this one from lecture 5: we humans are more closely related genetically to yeast then we are to maize. Think of that the next time you eat cornbread or suffer from a yeast infection.
Deacon’s [...]

Attention Roman history fans

Indiana Jen, aka Texas Christian University archaeologist Jennifer Lockett, is back this fall with two new podcast courses about the ancient world. She has prepared both courses as “enhanced podcasts,” which means that if you use an MP3 player with a video screen, you can see the visual slides along with the lectures. In [...]

Did tea cause the industrial revolution?

Anthropologist Alan Macfarlane of Cambridge University has an intriguing theory about the origins of the Industrial Revolution.  You can hear about it in the course of these lectures on population growth.
But what does that have to do with tea?
Macfarlane notes that one of the big puzzles for modern demographers is why the population of England [...]

More lectures on ancient Rome

Indiana Jen, AKA Jennifer Lockett, a classical archaeologist who teaches at Texas Christian University, gives a rousing introduction to Roman archaeology in a series of lectures posted on iTunes and on her website.  If you have a video iPod, you can also see the slides that go along with these enhanced MP3 lectures.  That’s a [...]