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Thursday, January 12, 2006

The first week

I have now had at least one meeting of each of the courses I am taking this semester. Like last, it’s still too early to tell which will end up being my favorite, but I’m much more confident to make a guess this time around. On Monday I started off at 9am with Ancient States, taught by my thesis advisor. The usual graduate seminar format, it’s essentially part two of Chiefdoms, a course I took last semester. Our main text is Bruce Trigger’s Understanding Early Civilizations, a great volume that examines seven different prestate societies and how they came about. Last semester’s Chiefdoms course was replete with theory (which I crave in a twisted way) but Ancient States is going to be more culture history oriented although we’re still looking at theories quite a bit. We have one research paper and a class presentation. My class presentation is going to be on Dynastic Egypt and I’ll be leading discussion for about a third of one of the meetings.

Paleoclimatology is my required elective outside of the Anthropology department. My knowledge of how climate works is limited but judging from the two meetings so far and what I’ve read, it’s going to be not only interesting but practical to my research (depending on exactly what I end up doing for my thesis). I am probably most excited about this class because of the hands-on research and field trips we’ll be doing. This Saturday, actually, we’ll going to a protected area of Tampa Bay were the plan is to collect clams and carry out analysis. This is going to involve some canoeing and getting dirty, something I haven’t done since Belize last summer. The other trips are tree coring at a local park, sediment sampling at a cave north of Tampa (spelunking!), and a sediment coring expedition in the bay. Besides the field trips, I’m excited about the group research project, which I’ll be working on with two of my friends who are also Mesoamerican archaeologists. We are to carry out actual field work and lab analysis and produce a publishable report of the results. Obviously it will be nothing extensive but good practice at doing something different.

Finally, Foundations of Applied Anthropology II is the sequel to a required course that examines the history and thought of applied anthropology. There is plenty of reading and writing for this class but it’s useful in the sense that I’ll learn why I’m at USF in the first place. As opposed to most of the courses I’ve taken and will take, this one brings together all first-year masters and PhD students regardless of track or focus which makes for an interesting and lively debate about the different topics. Anthropology is indeed a single discipline but you would be surprised at the array of opinions coming from so many different academic interests. The books include David Hurst Thomas’ Skull Wars, which I am reading now.

All and all off to a good start this semester. I’ll be writing less now that I’m back in the groove of graduate school but I anticipate plenty of thoughts about what I’ll be learning, to be sorted out here!

Posted by Will at January 12, 2006 05:06 PM in Graduate School