All upcoming Archaeology programs

Thousands of years ago, Indigenous peoples in the Andes assessed their climate, geography, and ecology and realized that, to provide better support for agriculture and herding, they needed to harness water. Their solution was to build hydraulic infrastructure, such as canals, terraces, reservoirs, and dams. Archaeologist Kevin Lane reveals the story of canals on the coast and in the Central Andes and explains how these old technologies are being repurposed today to deal with the effects of climate change.

Our understanding of dinosaur behavior has long been hampered by the inevitable lack of evidence from animals that went extinct more than 65 million years ago. But with the discovery of new specimens and the development of cutting-edge techniques, paleontologists are making huge advances in reconstructing how dinosaurs acted. Paleontologist David Hone provides a look at the fundamentals of dinosaur biology and evolution and describes feeding, communication, and social behavior.

Home to over a million objects from around the globe, Philadelphia’s Penn Museum bridges the study of archaeology and anthropology. Spend the day immersed in ancient art and culture with art historian Renee Gondek and see Sumerian cuneiform tablets, Buddhist sculptures, Native American regalia, and the monumental Sphinx of Ramses II, plus the Greek gallery, which represents the history and culture of Greece from 3000 to 31 B.C.E. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the fossil skeleton known as Lucy. Learn more about this 3.2-million-year-old find and the significance of its species, Australopithecus afarensis, from paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Paleo-artist John Gurche discusses how he reconstructed Lucy’s body for the museum and why several of her features are unlike those of any human or ape living today.

When classicist Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B script in 1952, he shed light on our understanding of the politics, economy, society, and religion of the world of Late Bronze Age Greece, sometimes referred to as "Mycenaean." Classicist and archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis examines what this writing system and a second still-undeciphered “Minoan” script, Linear A, can tell us about life in the Aegean during the second millennium B.C.E.