Frances Condron, Learning Technologies Group Pamela Wace, Donald Baden -
Powell Quaternary Research Centre
Tutorial on Aegean civilizations and the Near East
Getting into the subject: several resources are available for you to
find your way into this tutorial topic. You can see how other departments teach
the Aegean civilizations through their online course material; you can run
searches on Argos; explore online articles and site reports.
Read all of these things carefully. Because anyone can put pages on the Web,
you have to take a critical approach to online resources.
Can you find out who has written these documents?
What evidence can you find to show that the documents are reliable,
quality sources of information?
Do you find the arguments convincing?
What information would you like to find but don't have from these
resources?
When looking through these resources, consider the following questions:
What does the term 'civilization' mean?
Are terms such as village, town, palace, city useful? Why could their use
be problematic?
How are civilizations manifested archaeologically?
What are the differences archaeologically between the civilizations of the
Near East and the Aegean?
Are archaeological approaches to these two areas different, the same?
What environmental differences are there between the Aegean and the Near
East? How do the human responses to the environment, and environmental change,
differ in these two areas?