ANT222H5

Engineering Eden: Human-Environment Interactions from Prehistory to Present

Have you ever wondered what makes our species so different from other life on this planet? Have we always innovated and imagined our worlds? Why do we manipulate and transform our surroundings? How did we reach our current ecological predicament - termed the Anthropocene - where we now impact every ecological system on earth? Based on our past, what is the future of our species? Overpopulation and resource scarcity? Or, are we about to usher in an age of abundance? This course seeks to explore these questions through the lens of archaeology. Using a wide-range of scientific and social science datasets we will consider the development and intensification of human-environment interactions through time, using the metaphor of Eden (an idealized place of plenty) to frame the course modules.