Current course offerings

Please Note: Course profiles marked as not available may still be in development.

Course description

Whether as food, fuel or shelter, plants are among the fundamental building blocks of human life, and archaeology is increasingly able to reconstruct the global, deep-time history of human plant use from the evolution of our earliest ancestors. In this course, students will explore the entangled history of plants and people, including the role of plant foods and fire in human evolution, the global origins and development of farming, the central role of plants in trade and globalisation, and the history of landscape management, biodiversity loss and the emergence of the Anthropocene. Practical classes will introduce students to the methods of archaeobotany, the science that underpins these discoveries, including how plant remains can be routinely recovered from archaeological sites. Our course concludes with a consideration of how archaeological knowledge of the past is helping to revive cultures, improve economic resilience and rebuild landscapes in the present.

Archived offerings