21H.405J | Spring 2005 | Undergraduate

The Ancient City

Assignments

There are two major assignments that comprise 75% of a student’s course grade.

Group Project (25% of course grade)

Adopt-a-City Web-site

Though much of our attention in this subject will be on the cities of Athens and Rome, it is of course important for you to familiarize yourselves with a range of the lesser known Greek and Roman urban sites. To that end, I will ask you to work in small groups each of which will be assigned an individual city (chosen by lot from a list including Aphrodisias, Cosa, Delos, Herculaneum, Knidos, Miletos, Morgantina, Olynthus, Paestum, Priene). Each group will be required to create an informative web-site about its chosen city for use by yourselves and your colleagues in the class when you all come to write your research papers at the end of the term.

An example of a good Web-site will include, but not be limited to:

  • History of the city
  • History of archaeological work on the site
  • Photos, plans, reconstructions of remains
  • Literary and epigraphic evidence
  • An annotated bibliography
  • Links to existing sites of relevance

The Adopt-a-City Web-sites will be due during class in lecture 8.

Paper Of 12-15 Pages (50% of course grade)

The paper should be a research paper of 12 to 15 pages on a theme of your choice, but one that allows for focus on the city of Athens and/or the city of Rome in order to complement your work on the group projects and to reflect our work together in the weekly meetings.

The final paper will be due at the start of our final class meeting, lecture 12.