With the looting in the Middle East and destruction of antiquities following the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and the rise of ISIS (among other events), the issue of the ownership and conservation of cultural heritage has become an increasingly hot topic in today's politicized, global environment. But these issues are not new, and they are not limited to the Middle East. Humans across cultures have historically attached great religious, cultural, political, and social value to a variety of cultural artifacts and sites, usually with significant immediate and historical consequences. Political ideologies, such as colonialism and nationalism, wars, poverty, a thriving illicit antiquities market: all of these are entwined with the ways in which the knowledge about the past is manipulated, collected, interpreted, presented, preserved, and destroyed to create meaning in the present.

This course explores this relationship between past cultural heritage and the present through a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary survey of the human obsession with the past. We will consider a variety of topics such as the history of archaeology, the antiquities trade, and disputes over cultural ownership, along with a discussion of the repatriation of artifacts and current controversies surrounding antiquities around the globe. The course seeks to engage students in thinking, talking, and writing about the following questions:

1. Why preserve the past, and in what ways and forms?
2. How do established ideas and practices drive the ways in which people understand and manipulate knowledge of the past via cultural heritage?
3. Who should have the right to profit (monetarily and otherwise) from the past?
4. How do political bodies, museums, collections, restitution of artifacts, and the antiquities market contribute to battles and crises surrounding cultural property?
5. How might we mitigate the ongoing struggle for control of the past? What solutions have already been tried or proposed?