Viewing: CLST 136 O: The Ancient Economy

Last approved: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 14:40:18 GMT

Last edit: Thu, 12 Sep 2019 13:28:55 GMT

Rationale for Inactivation

Last Effective Term

Requested By

First Name	Last Name	Userid	Title	Home School	Org Short Name
Kimberly	Bowes	kbowes	Associate Professor	School of Arts and Sciences	Classical Studies

Course Subject

CLASSICAL STUDIES

Course Number

136

Start Term

Spring 2020

Committee Term

Fall 2019

Course Title

The Ancient Economy

Course Description

This class presents an introduction to economies before economics, a study of economic activity in the Greco-Roman world. Ancient Greece and Rome have been called some of the first "global" economies - they engaged in long-distance trade, introduced the first coinage systems, and built and manufactured at large scales. At the same time, they remained agrarian societies, with majority peasant populations, high levels of inequality and social systems that often placed social capital ahead of profit. Using textual sources, archaeology and techniques from the natural and social sciences, this class will not only look at basic elements of economic activity in the ancient world - demographics, trade, monetization, industry - but also ask critical questions about how - or if -modern economic methods can be applied to the distant past. No previous knowledge of the ancient world or economics is necessary.

Also Offered As

ANCH 136 - The Ancient Economy

Syllabus

CLST 136 The Ancient Economy 2020.docx

Course Frequency

Every Other Year

Sector Requirements

Your department or program fields a variety of courses to meet distinct educational needs. Please explain how this course fits into your department's plan for participating in the general education curriculum of the College. The sector panel will want to know what is distinctive about this course along with the other courses your department lists in the sector that makes them suitable for the sector requirement.

Endorser Justification

Presently, CLST 140 Scandalous Arts in Ancient and Modern Societies (Ralph Rosen) is our one Sector IV course: its function within that sector is to offer ways of thinking about literary and artistic production (both ancient and modern) in relation to society and politics. But that course is relatively humanities-focused, and also it is now being offered less frequently (around every 3 years). The new course CLST 136 The Ancient Economy (Kim Bowes), taught in alternate years, would offer ways of thinking through the relationship between economics and other areas of cultural production, including literature and intellectual history, and also the material culture associated with archaeology (Bowes' main area of expertise); it would also necessarily involve ancient-modern comparison. The new course is more obviously engaged with a social science (economics), and by drawing on economic analytic methods would showcase a new set of potential approaches to the ancient world that did not play a strong role in traditional classical studies. Students will come away from the course with both an enhanced awareness of the history of economics (both actuality and theory) and a new point of entry into classical antiquity. That is reflective of our department's broader goals in offering general education courses.

Term Offered

One-term course offered either term

Sector Requirements

Humanities & Social Science Sector

Format

LEC

Instructor Name

Bowes

Instructor Type

Standing Faculty

Instructor Status

Standing Faculty

Place in Curriculum

Part of the department's introductory rota, designed to introduce non-classics specialists or potential majors to various aspects of the ancient world.

Instructor's Objectives

At the completion of this course students should:
1. Have a basic understanding of the evidence for ancient economic activity – from inscriptions and archaeological datasets to literature and legal sources.
2. Have the essential toolkits for analysis and criticism of these sources, asking what constitutes our “data” and what behaviors/activities it documents.
3. Be able to carry out basic analysis (averages, trends over time, deviations from a mean) on a quantitative dataset
4. Understand and critique the major methodological debates within the field, particularly the application of modern economic models versus the use of traditional social history.
5. Be able to define what constitutes “economic” thinking and behavior in modern and ancient contexts and how/if this can use usefully separated from other spheres of activity.
6. Improve your oral communication skills through in-class group work, debates and a 5-minute oral presentation.

Methods of Assessment

Number and size of paper(s) assigned

2 papers; 1 short (2-3 pages); 1 long (10-15 pages), oral presentation

Number and type of exams

midterm, final

Other Requirements

daily in-class exercises for a grade, either in group or individual format

Sector I - Society

How does this course allow students to formulate and test social science hypotheses?

How does the course provide students with an understanding of social theories?

How will students understand the basis of empirical social science?

How will students gather and interpret data about social phenomena?

How does the course encourage students’ understanding of culture, religion, class, gender, race, or other fundamental social constructs?

How does the course enable students to understand the role of institutions in society, the relationship between individuals and those institutions, or the relationship among ideologies, values, and individual behavior?

Sector II - History and Tradition

How does this course allow students to read and interpret primary sources?

How will students be able to contextualize the primary materials they examine?

How will students closely read materials and discuss their core ideas?

How will students learn to interpret visual or material objects?

How do students have the opportunity to write significant interpretive essays about the sources they study?

How does the course provide students with an interpretive framework for analyzing change over time?

How does the course contribute to understanding of how knowledge is constructed and how interpretive frameworks change over time?

Sector III - Arts & Letters

How does the course allow students to develop interpretive strategies for analyzing visual, aural or literary texts?

How does the course offer students ample opportunity to write significant interpretive essays?

How does the course allow students to develop an appreciation of the creative process within a medium or in a variety of artistic media?

If a course is narrowly focused, how does it provide for breadth through understanding the social context or continuing significance of the work(s) being analyzed?

Sector IV - Humanities and Social Science

How does the course integrate theory with practical applications?

The course begins with several weeks of theoretical models used to study the ancient economy: the remainder of the course is structured as a series of data-based interrogations of those models: for examples, does the data for Mediterranean shipwrecks support the notion of an integrated Mediterranean economic system? The course additionally asks students to contemplate how this ancient data represents economic phenomena in complex ways. Eg. above, do Mediterranean shipwrecks represent trading activity, or changes in navigation or shipbuilding practices, or both, to different extents in different periods?

How are students allowed the opportunity to reflect on practice?

The research component of the project is an assisted attempt to interrogate numerical data for economic significance. Thus, the students will be actually asked to "do" economic history with actual datasets - vis above, e.g. ancient shipwreck data, inscriptions from specific contexts, mines, quarries, climate data, etc.. This will include first an assessment of the rigor and significance of the data, and then very basic quantitative analysis - basic statistical analysis, changes over time, etc. - to draw conclusions from that data.
The weekly "SAIL" exercises present mini practice exercises in practical data analysis: students are given a set of data in their reading for each class, and asked to practice on it in class, either singly or in groups. This provides the basic theoretically and technical background for their research projects.

How does the course allow students to integrate approaches from two or more humanities or social science disciplines?

The course is imagined as a meditation on how modern economic approaches, particularly New Institutionalist and development economics approaches - and social historical approaches can or should be applied to the ancient world. The initial theoretically framing of the course in the first two weeks sets out these different methods and they are reiterated as a recurrent theme nearly ever week. Thus, the course is framed as both an integration of and comparison between the humanities and social sciences.

How does the course place creative practice in writing, music or the fine arts in an interpretive context?

The course makes considerable use of literary sources , and provides students essential tools for interrogating them, e.g. asking how the so-called agronomists construct both social-historical narratives while imparting technical advice, how slave economies are presented and contested in Greek and Roman drama. Thus, students learn how to read literary as literature while also gauging the extent to which it can be used as economic data.

Sector V - Living World

How does the course allow students to examine data, critically assess their origins, and consider the conclusions that can be drawn from them?

How does the course teach students how experimental and observational methods, as well as quantitative reasoning, are applied to the study of living systems?

How do students learn the methods used by contemporary natural science to study how organisms influence and are influenced by the environment?

How do students learn how to characterize and analyze basic population dynamics?

How do students learn about ecological diversity and how to measure it?

Sector VI - Physical World

Does the course allow students to examine data, critically assess their origins, and consider the conclusions that can be drawn from them?

How does the course teach students how experimental and observational methods, as well as quantitative reasoning, are applied to the study of physical systems?

How do students learn the methods used by contemporary natural science to study interactions among physical systems?

How does the course have students use mathematical methods to test observational data and formulate and test hypotheses?

How do students learn about the relevance of theory to the world of ordinary observation?

Sector VII - Natural Sciences and Mathematics

How does this course integrate knowledge across two or more disciplines in the natural sciences/mathematics?

How does the course integrate theory with practice?

Administrative Field

College reason for proposal

Committee

College Humanities and Social Science Panel

Committee reader

Administrative Status

Reviewer Comments

James Ker (jker) (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 13:59:51 GMT): I fully support this proposal.

Molly Mcglone (mmcglone) (Fri, 16 Aug 2019 14:33:11 GMT): Rollback: James- can you please add the "endorser justification" for the HSS panel on why you think it should be a sector for CLST? Thanks! Molly