Module description
In this module, we explore the ‘deep’ past of humans, the environment and other living things, thinking about old histories going back thousands, and even millions of years. Examining developments in Africa, Eurasia, Australasia, the Pacific and the Americas, we think about the diverse ways that humans and the natural world have interacted, and how we as historians can understand very long-term and large-scale continuity and change.
In doing so, we engage with some big questions: What was the world like before humans? When and why did key things in human existence – art, language, agriculture and state systems - develop? How have humans, across the world and across time, interacted with the environments around them, and with animals, plants and microbes? What new perspectives does thinking on this big scale give to us as historians? And what risks and challenges are there in looking at the past in this way?
We will use historical perspectives, but will also link these with archaeology, anthropology, biology, climate science, palaeontology, and non-Western and
Indigenous cosmologies. We will use these different fields to think about how we might approach and understand the past, and human societies very different from our own. But we will also think about the limits of these approaches, as they have themselves been conditioned by power, inequality and colonialism. Because the questions we ask of the deep past are not just about the past. They are also about how we understand the fundamental qualities of human existence, and how humans fit in with the world, and all of its inhabitants.
Assessment details
1 x 2,500 word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern
10 x 2 hour seminars (weekly)