Monuments and Landscapes: Memory, Identity, and Power

3 credits · Undergraduate

How do monuments shape landscapes, and how do landscapes give monuments meaning? This course explores relationships among nature, people, places, memory, identity, and power through archaeological case studies from different regions and periods. Students examine natural and cultural features, asking why communities build monuments, reuse older places, erase unwanted pasts, and contest inherited landscapes. They also investigate how erosion, flooding, sediment deposition, and other environmental processes transform, preserve, or threaten heritage sites, and how communities adapt to these changing conditions. The course introduces landscape archaeology, spatial analysis, material culture, oral history, remote sensing, and digital visualization in accessible but intellectually ambitious ways. Rather than treating landscape as a passive background, we approach it as a layered record shaped by natural processes and human activity: movement, labor, ritual, memory, ecology, violence, and political claims. Through discussion, field observation, comparative interpretation, and a final StoryMap project, students investigate monument - landscape relationships over time, connecting evidence of physical landscape change with questions about social meaning, memory, and power.