Featured Undergraduate Course Descriptions

While we humans tend to focus on ourselves, the goal of this course is to examine the natural history and behavior of your closest relatives, the nonhuman primates. Through lectures, streaming videos and web based materials, you will explore the diversity of primates from an evolutionary, biological and ecological perspective...

Maymester 2018 What is America? Who are the American people? How is American culture defined both “at home” and abroad? Using anthropological and historical knowledge, we will trace how American society, broadly defined, emerged from the precolonial era to the present day. Students will not be required to purchase textbooks...

What does it mean to be multiracial? How are people of mixed heritage seen throughout the world? Who is mixed? Who is not? In the United States, how does being bi/multiracial play into the narrative of a post-racial society? This course will apply an anthropological perspective to mixed race identities...

Throughout history, landscapes have affected human actions, and human actions have affected landscapes. The complex interactions between humans and the environment help shape who we are, where and how we live, and what we do. In this course, we will consider what landscapes are, how archaeologists study them, and why...

This course examines contemporary issues in the anthropology of mining. We begin with a historical approach, looking at the antiquity of mineral extraction around the world, plus the effects of pre-20th century gold rushes - especially in the US - and how these have shaped the relationships between indigenous peoples...

What does it mean to describe a friend as “like family”? When is “family” actually about disconnection rather than connection? In what ways do people “choose” their own family members? Are members of a nation part of a “national family”? How do processes like international adoption shape understandings of race...

This undergraduate/graduate course traces the development of anthropology in museums from the late 19th century to the present day. Museums are places where ideas, identities, theories and power relations are debated, created, and placed on display. They are places that reflect and sometimes challenge dominant ideologies about indigenous peoples to...

The courses you have taken in biological anthropology at CU have been developed to give you an understanding of the current state of knowledge in the discipline as well as a sufficient understanding of the terms and methodology to allow you to acquire and critically evaluate relevant new information. This...

This course examines the Prehispanic cultures of Mexico including the Aztec, Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Chatino. We trace cultural developments in Mexico over the last 12,000 years by examining social organization, ideology, daily life, religion, art, writing, subsistence, technology, and exchange. The course considers some of the most important transitions...

In this course you will learn the various ways archaeologists use whole and broken pottery pieces to reconstruct the past. We will survey some of the most interesting recent findings and learn how to analyze pottery using museum collections. Topics we will cover include how archaeologists classify pottery, how pottery...