Humans began making tools more than 2.5 million years ago. Written out, that number looks like this: 2,500,000. But it was less than 6,000 years ago that some peoples began writing down information about their ways of life. Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations — in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica — and some groups around the world did not adopt writing until just a few centuries ago. Only 3% of the time since humans started making tools is documented at all in written historical records. The other 97%, from 2.5 million years ago to 6,000 years ago, is the realm of prehistory.

This course is organized around two questions: How did people live in prehistoric times and places? And how do we know? Without written records, the only way to learn about prehistoric cultures is through the material remains they left behind — the artifacts, structures, food remains, and features that archaeologists excavate from the ground. The course focuses on a small number of specific sites drawn from across the world and across deep time, arranged not from oldest to newest, but from the most familiar to the most remote from our own experience.

The required book is Paul Bahn, Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012). Eight journal articles covering specific archaeological sites form the second half of the readings. Importantly, the lectures and readings are designed to complement each other rather than overlap: very little of what the lectures cover appears in the readings, and the readings will not be discussed at length in the lectures. Both are assessed separately, so both must be done.

Module 1: Course Introduction

Unit 1: About This Course and Prehistory

Archaeology and paleoanthropology both deal with things dug up from the ground. The distinction is what they focus on: archaeologists study the things that people made — artifacts, structures, food remains — while paleoanthropologists focus on human skeletal remains, the bones of our ancestors. This course is primarily archaeological.

Within archaeology, courses can be organized in several ways. Method and theory courses teach how archaeologists work — fieldwork, excavation, analysis. Regional prehistory courses survey the archaeological record of a particular part of the world. Thematic courses are organized around a specific topic: the archaeology of hunter-gatherers, complex societies, or landscape, for example. This course is deliberately different from all of these. Rather than surveying broad cultures or following a strict chronological sequence, it focuses on a handful of individual archaeological sites — the way an actual archaeologist experiences the past. Looking at individual sites shows us how archaeologists go about their work: what they find, what it tells them, and what questions remain open.

The course will proceed, in general, from sites and ways of life that seem somewhat familiar and recognizable — more recent sites — to sites and ways of life that are very different from our own, reaching back to sites made two and a half million years ago. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

1. Explain what archaeologists wish to learn about prehistoric peoples’ lives and societies
2. Describe the methods and techniques used to learn about the prehistoric past
3. Outline how those methods have been employed at each of the sites studied
4. Summarize what has been learned about the people who lived at those sites

Unit 2: About the Professor

Prof. Robert Park is an anthropological archaeologist — the most all-encompassing kind, and the type that studies prehistory specifically. His teaching assistant is Jennifer Cullison, who is working toward a master’s degree.

Park began his career working for the Ontario government as an archaeologist, with early projects in southern Ontario. He then spent a field season in Yukon at a place called Macmillan Pass. But most of his research career has been spent in the Canadian Far North — Nunavut and the Northwest Territories — working in the Arctic archaeology of both prehistoric and historical Indigenous peoples. One of his own excavation sites, Porton Point, will be the subject of a full module in this course.

Unit 3: The Prehistoric Places We’ll Be Studying

Across the 13 modules of this course, Prof. Park introduces the following sites (listed roughly in the order the course covers them):

Module 2 — History of archaeology:

• Brixham Cave (southwestern England) — “probably the least interesting archaeological site we will discuss,” but crucial to the history of archaeology; its discovery transformed scientific understanding of human antiquity
• Abbeville and Sainte-Acheul (northern France) — gravel quarry sites whose importance only became recognized after Brixham

Modules 5–6 — Prehistoric cities and towns:

• Cahokia (North America) — large prehistoric city; possibly familiar, and deeply impressive
• Çatalhöyük (Turkey) — prehistoric city; important both for what it is and for the history of its excavations; much of what we know about life in prehistoric cities comes from work there
• The Mantle Site / Jean-Baptiste Lainé Site (north of Toronto) — a prehistoric Iroquoian town that has been almost completely excavated, very revealing about life in prehistoric Ontario

Module 7 — Ideology:

• Stonehenge and Durrington Walls (Wiltshire, England) — closely linked sites that together provide insights into what people believed and what mattered to them

Module 8 — Earliest farming:

• Abu Hureyra (Syria) — evidence of the earliest transition to food production
• Princess Point (Hamilton, Ontario) — the closest archaeological site to Kitchener-Waterloo; now a park that visitors can walk through; one of the earliest evidence of maize cultivation in Ontario

Modules 9–10 — Hunting and gathering:

• Porton Point (Canadian Arctic) — Park’s own excavation; Arctic sites are remarkable for the preservation that permafrost provides
• Star Carr (northeastern England) — one of the most important Mesolithic sites in Europe
• Willimaya Patacha (South America) — recently published, revealing new aspects of life in hunting and gathering societies

Module 11 — Early human ideology:

• Altamira Cave (northern Spain) — stunning Upper Paleolithic cave art
• Chauvet Cave (southern France) — some of the world’s oldest and most dramatic cave art

Module 12 — Early human behavior:

• Zhoukoudian (near Beijing, China) — very important site, and an “intriguing Canadian connection”
• Shanidar Cave — evocative insights into Neanderthal behavior

Module 13 — Earliest toolmakers:

• Olorgesailie (near Nairobi, Kenya) — early human behavior in the Great Rift Valley
• FLK West, Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) — the Great Rift Valley; site of the earliest stone tools

Unit 4: Reviewing the Course Outline

The course unfolds across 13 weekly modules. Assessment is based on four online open-book quizzes, a midterm exam, a final exam, two sets of reflections, and a research assignment.

Reflections are written twice during the course. They require students to reflect in some way on what they’ve been learning; specific instructions are provided in each module.

The research assignment involves reading an additional journal article about an archaeological site and reporting on it; details are provided when it is assigned.

A critical point: the lectures and readings cover almost entirely different material. The readings are tested in the quizzes and exams but are not discussed at length in the lectures. The lectures provide context, narrative, and analysis that does not appear in the readings. Students who do only one or the other will be underprepared for the assessments.

Module 2: The Discovery of Prehistory

Unit 1: The Discovery of Prehistory

The concept of prehistory — the idea that human beings existed long before any written record — seems obvious today. But it had to be discovered. General agreement that there was a vast prehistoric period was reached only 162 years before this course was taught, in 1859. Prof. Park argues this is not as long ago as it sounds.

Consider the generations. Statistics Canada reports that the average age of mothers at childbirth has been over 30 since 2010. Take a typical first-year student, aged about 20 in 2021: their parents were born around 1971, their grandparents around 1941, great-grandparents around 1911, great-great-grandparents around 1881, great-great-great-grandparents around 1851, and their great-great-great-great-grandparents — four “greats” — around 1821. You have probably spoken with your grandparents, who spoke with their grandparents, who spoke with their grandparents — people born in 1821 who were adults (around 38 years old) in 1859. You are separated from the moment prehistory was discovered by only a chain of three conversations.

The tradition before 1859. Interest in the past is ancient: we know that Bronze Age Chinese and Babylonians actually excavated old sites. But the dominant tradition throughout much of the world — and in the Western intellectual tradition specifically — was that the only way to learn about the past was through legends, myths, and written records. For ancient Greeks and Romans, and later for the societies shaped by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religious texts were the authoritative source on human history. This meant that no one thought to excavate the ground to learn about the past, and the age of the earth and humanity was read from scripture.

Archbishop Ussher and the 6,000-year earth. The most careful such calculation was produced around 400 years ago by James Ussher, an Anglican archbishop in Ireland. He calculated, and this is a direct quotation, that creation began “upon the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October in the year 4004 BC.” Ussher was not a simple-minded fundamentalist; he was a serious and careful scholar. He worked by compiling the genealogical records in the Hebrew Old Testament, cross-referencing them with dates in Babylonian and Egyptian historical records, and calculating backward. His was considered one of the best such estimates, and the consensus of this scholarly tradition held that the Earth was about 6,000 years old. This calculation was so authoritative that it was eventually printed in the margins of King James Bibles.

The consequence for archaeology was absolute: any human remains or artifacts must date to within that 6,000-year window. If human tools appeared alongside the bones of extinct animals, either those animals hadn’t actually gone extinct, or the association of tools and bones was misleading.

New lines of evidence. Between the 1600s and early 1800s, four new bodies of evidence began to strain Ussher’s framework: geology, fossils, artifacts, and human anatomy.

Geology. In the 1600s and 1700s, natural historians began observing that the surface of the Earth is layered — like a layer cake. The theory of stratigraphy gave a tool for understanding this. Nicholas Steno, a Catholic priest, established the theoretical basis in the 1600s when he introduced the law of superposition: in an undisturbed geological deposit, the oldest layers are at the bottom and the youngest at the top. The many layers visible in the Earth suggested that different strata had been deposited over long stretches of time.

One widespread kind of layer was distinctive enough to get its own name: diluvium. These very distinctive deposits — thick layers of coarse sand and gravel — were found across Europe and North America. Since sand and gravel like this can be observed forming today in water, the diluvium was interpreted as the result of rapid flooding. Think of diluvium, think of deluge. Today we know these deposits to have been formed during ice ages — they are glacial deposits. But before ice ages were understood, diluvium was the interpretation.

Fossils. Within the diluvium and elsewhere, natural historians found fossils of plants and animals no longer living anywhere on Earth — extinct species. Some of the most dramatic were animals related to modern elephants but different from them: mammoths and mastodons. There were also giant sloths and many other species. From studying their fossilized bones, it was clear they had lived and then become extinct before any written records documented them. This meant that any undisturbed deposit containing the bones of these extinct animals must be extremely old.

The French researcher Georges Cuvier studied these fossils intensively and concluded that the deposits of diluvium had formed very rapidly during catastrophic flooding. (Some researchers — though not Cuvier himself — associated these deposits with Noah’s Flood.) Cuvier’s model became known as the theory of catastrophism: Earth’s history involved a series of catastrophic events unlike anything observable in the modern world.

The opposing theory was proposed most thoroughly by Charles Lyell, a British geologist writing in the early 1830s. Lyell argued that all the geological features of the Earth — including the diluvium — could be explained by the same geological processes observable today. No catastrophic flooding was needed; instead, erosion, sedimentation, volcanic activity, and so on had been operating slowly and continuously throughout Earth’s history. This model became known as uniformitarianism. Its unavoidable implication was that the Earth had to be enormously old — far older than 6,000 years — to allow such slow processes to produce the modern landscape. Don’t forget Charles Lyell; he comes back later in this module.

Artifacts. Before the mid-1600s, the chipped flint and stone tools that kept turning up across Europe were thought to be either natural growths from the ground or the product of lightning strikes — sometimes called “thunderstones.” But antiquarians collecting and comparing more and more of these objects eventually concluded that they were human-made implements, created before people used metal. This was historically significant because even the classical Bronze Age, documented in ancient texts, included metal tools. A time before metal at all — a Stone Age — was not recorded in any oral tradition or written record. These stone tools were the first material evidence of a past that the written record had completely omitted.

Human anatomy. A fourth line of argument came from human physical diversity. People obviously come in a very wide range of appearances. How could all of this variety have developed from Adam and Eve just 6,000 years ago? Two theories were advanced. The first — that Adam was the first Jewish man and other human groups had been separately created before him — was quickly discredited because all humans everywhere can produce fertile offspring together, which is the mark of a single species. The second theory held that the differences between populations represented adaptations that developed as humans expanded across different environments.

But a challenge to this environmental adaptation theory came from an uncomfortable source: the descendants of people brought from Africa to Europe and the Americas as slaves in the 1600s. Two centuries later, their descendants still looked African — they had not begun to look like Northern Europeans despite living in a different environment for over 200 years and many generations. If physical differences couldn’t develop in 200 years, they must develop very slowly — and 6,000 years might not be enough time.

Then Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 provided decisive evidence. The scholars who accompanied the expedition explored 3,000-year-old Egyptian tombs and found elaborate paintings showing people with recognizably Egyptian characteristics alongside people with recognizably Asian characteristics. These images proved that roughly 3,000 years ago, human populations had already developed the physical differences they still have today. If that diversity existed 3,000 years ago, it must have developed in the first 3,000 years of human existence. And that seemed implausibly fast to almost everyone. The logical conclusion: humans must have been on Earth considerably longer than 6,000 years.

By the 1840s, the geological, fossil, and anatomical evidence had convinced most researchers that humans had to be older than Ussher’s calculation allowed. But the crucial question remained: how much older? That is where archaeological evidence would become decisive — as Unit 4 explains.

Unit 2: Archbishop Ussher and the Age of the Earth

This unit provides a brief reading on how Ussher calculated his famous date, and examines how it was received over the following centuries.

James Ussher (1581–1656) calculated, in his 1650 Annales Veteris Testamenti (Annals of the Old Testament), that the world was created on the night preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Ussher was a careful scholar: he compiled the genealogical records in the Hebrew Old Testament, cross-referenced them with Babylonian and Egyptian historical records to establish an absolute anchor point, and worked backward. His method was sophisticated enough that his conclusion was considered among the best of many similar attempts at the time.

While Ussher’s conclusion was simply wrong — the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and modern humans appeared around 300,000 years ago — Park notes that he “was wrong, but he was also a very serious, careful scholar. It was just that he was working within a tradition that prevented him from looking at other kinds of information that might have caused him to doubt his findings.”

The famous date was eventually printed in the margins of King James Bibles, giving it the force of canonical authority. It established the framework within which the scholars who would eventually discover prehistory were working.

Unit 3: Dr. Buckland’s Lecture on Geology and Religion (1819)

This unit presents an excerpt from Prof. William Buckland’s Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, “Vindiciae Geologicae; or the Connexion of Geology With Religion Explained” (1819). Buckland was one of the first professors of geology, and his lecture illustrates how thoughtful scholars tried to reconcile the emerging science with the biblical record.

William Buckland (1784–1856) occupied an unusual position. He was convinced, as a clergyman, that the biblical account of human creation was completely accurate. He was also convinced, as one of the founding figures of geological science, that the Earth itself had to be much older than 6,000 years. His reconciliation was elegant: the Earth was created long ago, and over the course of perhaps thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, was prepared by God for humans, who were then created approximately 6,000 years ago.

His 1819 lecture argues that geology, far from contradicting the Bible, actually confirms two key biblical claims:

“The two great points then of the low antiquity of the human race, and the universality of a recent deluge, are most satisfactorily confirmed by everything that has yet been brought to light by Geological investigations; and as far as it goes, the Mosaic account is in perfect harmony with the discoveries of modern science.”

The two “great points” are:

1. The low antiquity of the human race. No human remains had yet been found in geological layers old enough to challenge Ussher’s chronology, so Buckland took the absence as confirmation.
2. The universality of a recent deluge. The gravel, clay, and boulder deposits that Buckland called diluvium — found across Europe and North America — he interpreted as physical evidence of Noah’s Flood.

On the question of a very ancient Earth, Buckland argues that the opening verse of Genesis (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) allows for an indefinitely long period before the six days of creation:

“If Geology goes further, and shews that the present system of this planet is built on the wreck and ruins of one more ancient, there is nothing in this inconsistent with the Mosaic declaration… though Moses confines the detail of his history to the preparation of this globe for the reception of the human race, he does not deny the prior existence of another system of things.”

The collapse of diluvium. Buckland’s reconciliation held for roughly two decades. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz demonstrated that the deposits Buckland called diluvium were not flood deposits at all but the product of ice ages — glaciers advancing across northern Europe had deposited these boulders, gravels, and clays as they retreated. Buckland, to his great credit, accepted this evidence and became one of Agassiz’s most prominent supporters. The collapse of the diluvium theory removed the last easy mechanism for reconciling geological evidence with biblical chronology: if diluvium was glacial, not Noahic, then the deep geological record could no longer be accommodated within the 6,000-year framework.

Unit 4: The 1850s and Brixham Cave

Daniel Wilson and the word “prehistoric.” By the 1850s, archaeological finds were being studied in many areas. One researcher was a Scottish professor, Daniel Wilson, who in 1851 introduced the word prehistoric into the English language in his book The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland. Shortly afterward, Wilson emigrated to Canada and went on to become the first president of the University of Toronto. Prof. Park offers a striking personal connection: “My own great-grandfather took courses from Daniel Wilson at U of T.”

The problem before Brixham: cave stratigraphy. Over the late 1700s and early 1800s, finds from a number of cave sites seemed to indicate that humans were ancient — stone tools found together with the bones of extinct animals in the same deposits. But these finds came from caves, where the stratigraphy is often complex and disturbed. Water flowing through caves can move objects from one layer to another, mixing recent human remains with older animal bones. Almost no one believed the cave evidence showed genuine antiquity; the prevailing assumption was that flowing water or other processes had simply mixed up material of different ages. Skeptics pointed out that no human tools had ever been found in undisturbed diluvium deposits outside caves.

Boucher de Perthes and Abbeville. An extremely interesting character now enters the story: Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868). He had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army, then a novelist and playwright, an unsuccessful politician, a champion of women’s rights — and, most importantly for archaeology, a customs official at Abbeville on the Somme River in northern France. The river was being dredged to allow shipping, and the dredges brought up, along with mud, stone tools — including a polished stone axe still hafted in stone.

Boucher de Perthes published his findings in 1847 in Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes, including careful stratigraphic descriptions of where each artifact was found. But France’s Academy of Sciences rejected his work. The reasons were partly legitimate: his illustrations were poor, and he had included in his book a large number of “figured stones” — natural rocks he misidentified as animal carvings — along with the genuine stone tools. He also advanced some confusing and imaginative theories about recurring episodes of human creation and extinction. These errors allowed skeptics to dismiss him as a crackpot and ignore the genuine artifacts.

Rigollot at Sainte-Acheul. One skeptical French researcher was Marcel-Jérôme Rigollot, a doctor from Amiens. In 1853, hearing of finds at Sainte-Acheul near his home, he went to investigate. He excavated himself and personally recovered over 150 stone tools in gravels containing the remains of extinct elephants, horses, cattle, and deer — with workers finding an additional 400 tools. But Rigollot died soon after and could not forcefully advance his findings. The accumulated weight of professional opinion in France remained firmly against human antiquity. (The Sainte-Acheul site later gave its name to the Acheulean stone tool tradition, which we now know dates back to at least 1.76 million years ago in Africa.)

Why acceptance came in Britain. Although the earliest evidence came from France, it was in Britain that the idea of the great antiquity of humans first gained wide scholarly acceptance. The catalyst was the excavation of a cave — much like the caves that had been investigated and dismissed before, but with two crucial differences.

Brixham Cave. In 1858, limestone quarrying at Brixham Cave in southwestern England uncovered fossil bones. By coincidence, a respected geologist and a respected paleontologist both visited the cave at the same time and agreed to cooperate in its excavation. They secured funding from the Geological Society of London, which established a prestigious oversight committee — including Charles Lyell himself. The committee decided that careful stratigraphic excavations would be carried out, recording the position of every find layer by layer. This was unprecedented: until Brixham, no one had attempted careful stratigraphic excavation in a cave, because everyone assumed cave stratigraphy was too disturbed to be meaningful.

The excavations ran from the summer of 1858 to the summer of 1859. They produced thousands of animal bones — including rhinoceros and mammoth, species not found anywhere in Britain today — along with 15 definite stone tools and 21 possible stone tools. Many of these were found beneath, in the words of the excavators, “a sheet of stalagmite from three to eight inches thick,” with the bones of lion, hyena, bear, mammoth, rhinoceros, and reindeer both within and on top of it. The tools were sealed under a calcite floor that had grown over the deposits since they were laid down.

This demonstrated the crucial archaeological principle of association: objects found together in the same sealed, undisturbed context can be assumed to be the same age. The stalactite seal was physical proof that the stratigraphy had not been disturbed. Two things made Brixham different from all previous cave finds: first, detailed stratigraphic records documented that there was no evidence of disturbance — removing the skeptics’ standard objection. Second, the prestigious committee was present and directly confronted the evidence; these were people with reputations to protect, and they could not be ignored.

Lyell’s conversion. In May 1859, even before the Brixham excavations were complete, two committee members traveled to France to visit Boucher de Perthes, examine his collections, and visit his sites. At Sainte-Acheul, some committee members found stone tools themselves in the diluvium. They presented their findings to the British Royal Society at the end of the month. In the audience was Charles Lyell — who, despite being the proponent of uniformitarianism in geology, had long been a vocal opponent of human antiquity. Lyell was converted. He wrote:

“For the last quarter of a century, the occasional occurrence in various parts of Europe of the bones of man or the works of his hands in cave breccias and stalactites associated with the remains of the extinct hyena, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros has given rise to suspicion that the date of man must therefore be carried back further than we had heretofore imagined. On the other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt on the part of scientific reasoners to admit the validity of such evidence… The facts, however, recently brought to light during the systematic excavation of the Brixham Cave must, I think, have prepared you to admit that skepticism in regard to the cave evidence in favor of the antiquity of man has previously been pushed to an extreme.”

Lyell went on to note that he was “fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions which have recently been laid before the Royal Society in regard to the age of the flint implements associated in other caves” — first documented at Abbeville and Amiens by Boucher de Perthes and Rigollot. He had personally found stone tools during a visit to Amiens and Abbeville.

1859: a double revolution. The year 1859 was, as Park puts it, “an immensely important year in the history of knowledge.” It witnessed both the general acceptance by the British scientific establishment of the great antiquity of humans and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which relied on an ancient earth and argued that major biological change had occurred throughout deep time. These two revolutions reinforced each other. Consensus spread more slowly in France, where there was no single unifying event like the Brixham excavations, but it arrived within a year or two.

Lyell capitalized on the moment by publishing Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man in 1863 — a runaway bestseller that went through three editions in a single year. “People really wanted to read about this stuff,” Park notes, and a flood of similar books appeared over the following two decades. The consensus has remained intact ever since.

Modules 3–13: Course Overview

Only Modules 1–2 are in the zip archive. The following summarizes the course’s remaining content from the course outline, with site details from Prof. Park’s Unit 3 lecture.

Module 3: Anthropology and Ethnographic Analogy

Required reading: Bahn, chapters 4, 5, 6.

What would we like to learn about prehistoric peoples? This module draws on anthropology — the comparative study of human societies — to define the questions archaeologists ask. Ethnographic analogy uses observations of living forager, farmer, or pastoral societies to generate hypotheses about how similar prehistoric material remains might be interpreted. The goal is to build a framework for what aspects of social life leave archaeological traces and how.

Module 4: Archaeology — Methods and Techniques

Required reading: Bahn, chapters 7, 8, 9, 10.

How do archaeologists learn about the past? This module covers the methodological toolkit: survey and site location, excavation techniques, stratigraphic recording, artifact analysis, environmental reconstruction (pollen, faunal remains, isotopes), dating methods (radiocarbon, potassium-argon, dendrochronology), and the formation processes that determine how sites are preserved or degraded over time.

Module 5: Life in Prehistoric Cities — Cahokia and Çatalhöyük

Required reading: Hodder, Ian. 2004. “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük.” Scientific American 290(1):76–83.

Cahokia (near modern East St. Louis, Illinois) was the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, with a population perhaps exceeding 10,000 at its peak around 1100 AD. Its monumental earthworks — including Monks Mound, the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in North America — demonstrate complex political organization and coordinated labor.

Çatalhöyük (south-central Turkey, occupied c. 7500–5700 BC) is one of the earliest urban agglomerations yet found. Ian Hodder’s long-running excavation there has produced striking evidence about gender relations in early settled life: burial patterns, skeletal analysis, and labor-related wear suggest a remarkable degree of gender equality — both men and women engaged in similar activities and had comparable access to resources and status.

Module 6: Life in a Prehistoric Ontario Town — The Mantle Site

Required reading: Ramsden, Peter. 2016. “Becoming Wendat: Negotiating a New Identity around Balsam Lake in the Late Sixteenth Century.” Ontario Archaeology 96:121–133.

The Mantle Site (also known as the Jean-Baptiste Lainé site), located north of Toronto, is a late prehistoric Iroquoian village that has been almost completely excavated, making it unusually revealing about daily life in prehistoric southern Ontario. The Iroquoian-speaking peoples of this region lived in large longhouse villages surrounded by palisade walls, cultivating maize, beans, and squash. The Ramsden reading traces how the ancestral Wendat confederacy was forming in the late sixteenth century as previously distinct communities coalesced.

Module 7: The Importance of Ideology — Stonehenge and Durrington Walls

Required reading: Willis, Christie, et al. 2016. “The Dead of Stonehenge.” Antiquity 90(350):337–356.

Stonehenge (Wiltshire, England) is one of the world’s most studied archaeological sites. Together with the nearby settlement of Durrington Walls, it forms a linked complex that illuminates the role of ideology — beliefs, ritual, cosmology — in prehistoric life. Willis et al.’s analysis of cremated human remains at Stonehenge shows that the monument served as a burial place for a distinct social group drawn from across Britain, establishing it as a site of regional significance long before its famous sarsen setting was constructed.

Module 8: The Earliest Farming — Abu Hureyra and Princess Point

Required reading: Haines, Helen R., et al. 2011. “The Point of Popularity: A Summary of 10,000 years of Human Activity at the Princess Point Promontory, Cootes Paradise Marsh, Hamilton, Ontario.” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 35(2):232–257.

Abu Hureyra (Syria) provides some of the clearest evidence for the transition from foraging to farming in the ancient Near East, spanning the period from roughly 11,500 to 7,000 BC. Its continuous occupation across the shift to agriculture makes it a key reference site for understanding this fundamental transformation.

Princess Point (Hamilton, Ontario) is the closest archaeological site to Kitchener-Waterloo — a promontory on Cootes Paradise Marsh that has since been converted to parkland, where visitors can walk the ground (though the excavations have been backfilled). The site gives its name to the Princess Point Complex, the earliest evidence for maize cultivation in Ontario (around 500–1000 AD). Haines et al.’s research documents 10,000 years of human use of this promontory.

Module 9: Life in Hunting and Gathering Societies — Porton Point

Required reading: Park, Robert W. 1998. “Size Counts: The Miniature Archaeology of Childhood in Inuit Societies.” Antiquity 72(276):269–281.

Porton Point is Prof. Park’s own excavation site in the Canadian Arctic. Arctic sites are remarkable for the preservation provided by permafrost, which can preserve organic materials — wood, bone, skin, plant remains — that would long since have rotted away in temperate environments. This module introduces key concepts in hunter-gatherer archaeology: mobility, camp organization, seasonal rounds, and the management of unpredictable food resources.

Park’s reading examines the archaeology of childhood through miniature artifacts at Inuit sites — small tools, toy sleds, miniature kayaks — arguing that these objects reflect how children learned adult skills through guided practice and play.

Module 10: Hunting and Gathering Continued — Star Carr and Willimaya Patacha

Required reading: Conneller, Chantal, et al. 2012. “Substantial Settlement in the European Early Mesolithic: New Research at Star Carr.” Antiquity 86:1004–1020.

Star Carr (Yorkshire, England, c. 9000 BC) is one of the most important Mesolithic sites in Europe. Long thought a brief hunting camp, recent excavations have revealed evidence of a platform extending into a lake, occupation over multiple decades, and some of Britain’s earliest house structures. The site challenges assumptions about nomadic foragers.

Willimaya Patacha (South America) is a recently published site providing new insights into life in hunting and gathering societies.

Module 11: Early Human Ideology — Altamira and Chauvet

No specific journal article required (readings to be confirmed)

This module examines the earliest dramatic evidence of symbolic thinking and ideology in anatomically modern humans. Altamira Cave (northern Spain) and Chauvet Cave (southern France) contain some of the world’s most spectacular Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, dating to roughly 40,000–17,000 years ago. These images — painted horses, bison, rhinoceroses, lions, aurochs — demonstrate sophisticated artistic skill and, almost certainly, complex cosmological beliefs.

Module 12: Early Human Behavior — Zhoukoudian and Shanidar Cave

Required reading: Kuebler, Simon, et al. 2015. “Animal Movements in the Kenya Rift and Evidence for the Earliest Ambush Hunting by Hominins.” Nature Scientific Reports 5.

Zhoukoudian (near Beijing, China) is a major hominin site, associated with Homo erectus (historically called “Peking Man”), with an “intriguing Canadian connection” that will be explained in the module. Shanidar Cave (Iraqi Kurdistan) provides evocative evidence of Neanderthal behavior, including what has been interpreted as deliberate burial with flowers — evidence of ritual and possibly of beliefs about death. Kuebler et al.’s research at Olorgesailie in the Kenya Rift examines ambush hunting by hominins roughly 1 million years ago, using zooarchaeological and landscape analysis.

Module 13: The Earliest Toolmakers — FLK West, Olduvai Gorge

Required reading: Diez-Martín, F., et al. 2016. “The Origin of the Acheulean: The 1.7 Million-Year-Old Site of FLK West, Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania).” Scientific Reports 5(17839):1–9.

FLK West at Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) contains some of the oldest Acheulean tool assemblages yet documented — 1.7 million years old. The Acheulean tradition, named (as seen in Module 2) after the Sainte-Acheul site in France, is characterized by bifacial handaxes and cleavers, representing a significant technological advance over the earlier Oldowan chopper tools. Diez-Martín et al.’s excavations illuminate the earliest transition to this more complex technology, and the cognitive and behavioral capabilities of Homo erectus at the dawn of the Middle Pleistocene.

Key Terms Glossary