This seminar will focus broadly on bias in archaeology, covering issues of bias in authorship, citations, accessibility, popular media coverage, fieldwork, training and education, hiring and promotion, and other related topics. We will also address recent research that focuses on disrupting patterns of bias in some of these areas. Class meetings will involve discussion of published papers in the various course themes in order to both understand and interrogate the implications of previous studies and examine the methods used to empirically investigate topics of bias in the field. For their final project, students will engage in original research or synthesize research topics in one or more of these areas for their final project.

This graduate seminar was taught in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University in Spring 2022.