ANTH 2800

Erika's amazing as a TA but overall this class is pretty dry. Don't bother going to the lectures--as long as you do the reading you should get a decent grade.

This class is awful. Laviolette clearly likes archaeology but is not good at talking about stuff that's relevant to anything. The lectures are in slide format, but she posts the powerpoints online and they're not helpful at all. Almost all material for the midterm comes from READING THE TEXTBOOK. The discussions help a lot, too. Erika does a good job at giving organized notes (unlike the lecture notes) and explaining concepts well. This class is tedious tedious tedious. Take a history class instead if you want to learn about Stonehenge...

Only take this class if you are willing to teach yourself the material. The information tested comes straight from the book and her lectures give almost no supplemental material. Her lectures are never coherent and she asks you to know very minute details. She seems very knowledgeable, but she does not know how to communicate that in a classroom setting.

Discussions are interesting--go to them (plus attendance counts toward your grade)! Class itself involves a lot of rote memorization. Do well on your first midterm and it'll help balance out the harder second midterm.

She was awful. Terrible lecturer. She would skip over very text-heavy slides, yet leave up for 20 minutes slides with only photos. She failed to bring archaeology alive.

Really hated this class. Considering how cool the subject is, she does it no justice.

No papers or homework, just 2 essay based midterms and a final. Can be boring, and there's a lot of reading that you have to do if you want to do well on the exams. Material was pretty dry sometimes, but I guess that's to be expected in an intro class. Laviolette is pretty fair though, and enthusiastic about her work. Palazzo was nice but I didn't find discussion super engaging.

Don't let others' reviews scare you away from this class. This class was really not that bad. Yes, you had to memorize some things, but they were very straight forward. It was a little dull, but it's an into arch class. Do the reading and leave 3 days to cram for the exam and you will get an A.

This class wasn't "easy", but I was still able to make an A. You just have to do the reading and make sure you leave at least 3 days to study for an exam. It is a lot of information to memorize, but by no means is it impossible.

If you are interested in archaeology, the class was very worthwhile. I learned a lot and it was definitely an interesting subject. The professor is very passionate about what she does, which makes the course more interesting. I'd recommend the course to anyone.

Entering this class I thought it would be one of the more interesting classes that I would take here. However, Mrs. Laviolette did not do Archaeology a justice to the class - you could read a lot of information out of the book and do relatively well on the tests. In addition, she isn't the best lecturer either (not very engaging).