Visiting Scholar: Classics and Arch A (ANCW90003)

This subject will be taught by a Visiting Scholar in an area of their expertise. It will provide graduate-level engagement with contemporary work in the student's own or cognate disciplines. A subject description and any preliminary reading will be available by the beginning of the academic year in which the subject is to be taught.

2017: "The Long-Term History of Magic and Science"

Coordinator: Prof Chris Gosden (Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford)

Human history is often seen as moving from a reliance on magical practices to a belief in science. In this course I will explore a different view, which is that magic and science have an interlinked history, key to understanding many developments in the ancient world and in modernity. Magic derives from a feeling of oneness with the world; there are no barriers between people, other living beings and inanimate things. Modern science divides the world up into the realms of physics, chemistry and biology, looking for abstract laws and forces. Both magic and science take material form and archaeology is well placed to understand their long-term history. The first session explores the two central terms of magic and science, considering definitions, distinctions and overlaps between the two. The second session will look at Neolithic magic and science, considering the practices evidenced at sites ranging from Gobekli Tepe, Catalhoyuk to Stonehenge. We will also examine the nascent science of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt, underpinned as this was by writing and a developed mathematics. The third session will consider the interlinking of magic and science from the first millennium BC through to Greece and Rome. I will contrast this with more magical cultures north of the Alps and across the steppes, as represented by so-called Celtic and Scythian groups. The final session will consider the late antique world, ending with a discussion of how the notions of magic and science have played out in the settler history of Australia.