This course offers a survey of the archaeology of settled landscapes in the ancient Mediterranean world,
including both the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. In particular, the course will focus on
city-country dichotomies in order to study the patterns of development, demography, and land use in
selected case study areas. While the emergence of urban centers in the Mediterranean and Near East will
be an important consideration, the main focus of the course will be to study these landscapes in a
contextualized way, exploring the interrelatedness of the city center and its hinterland and examining the
ways in which human activity in the landscape over time brings about change. The course will be
interested in land use and exploitation, agricultural practice, the spatial and temporal dynamics of settled
landscapes, and the processes (and concomitant effects) of urbanism. It will also focus on the methods of
collecting landscape data through surface survey, as well as other means of geophysical prospection and
excavation. Case studies will be used to explore these themes, in addition to others, and will provide
students an opportunity to use archaeological data in order to produce a research paper based on a chosen
case study.