Fall 2004

ANT 324L • Colonial Latin American Archaeology

Course Description

This course will focus on the Spanish colonies in Latin America, developing four general topics during the course of the semester: 1)how the daily lives of colonizers, indigenous people, and African slaves engaged with imperial power; 2) religious conversion and its symbolic and social consequences; 3) agricultural and craft production in the colonial period; and 4) the methodological importance of combining material and historical evidence in studying the past. We will begin by considering issues of time, processes, structures, and events in colonial historiography, setting the stage for an anthropology of the Spanish empire that draws insights from comparing patterns, processes and events in different regions of the empire. We will continue with an overview of some of the many different people and places of the Spanish empire, including European colonizers, Africans, and indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America, the Andes, and the Caribbean. We will then study colonial Latin America, developing the three key issues listed above by drawing insights from a variety of sources, including historical documents, chronicles, architectural history, art history, and archaeological studies of material culture and settlement patterns.

back