This assignment calls on you to identify an important development in material culture, and to outline how it provides evidence informing our understanding of changes in one or multiple aspects of prehistoric human behaviour.
The subject(s) you choose can be any aspect of the human past during prehistoric periods that you find interesting. Potential areas of research could include, but are not limited to:
– Tool use and human cognitive abilities
– Hunting, gathering, social organization and gender
– Human dispersal(s) and interactions between archaic Homo species
– Emergence of symbolic behaviour, abstract ideas and possible developments in language
– Ritual, religion and different ways of envisioning and being in the world
– Prehistoric use of mind-altering substances such as alcohol, cannabis or peyote
– Ecological niche construction, sedentism and domestication of plants and animals
– Resource accumulation, social inequality, occupational specialization, and urbanization
These questions may be useful in stimulating your thinking in choosing a subject:
– What are range of dates and geographic region(s) that are relevant to your subject?
– What do you hope to demonstrate through your research efforts?
– What is your hypothesis and / or theoretical framework?
– What findings from other regions might illuminate findings from your main area of interest?
– Do you think the development in material culture you have identified was a single trigger, or one of a number of influences in changing human behaviour?
– Or, is this development in material culture simply a by-product of changes that were already underway?
Your essay should:
– Be well-organized, typewritten and double-spaced (1750-2000 words
– Include at least six relevant and reliable sources of information on your subject
– Properly cite sources using formats of the American Psychology Association.
