Vertical Civilization: Andean Archaeology and Andean Environments, From Monte Verde to the Inkas

3 units

Western South America is a land of environmental extremes - a realm where the world's driest desert, second-highest mountain chain, and largest rain forest rub shoulders with one another. Yet within this mosaic of diverse landscapes, human societies developed the hemisphere's earliest innovations in agriculture, monumental architecture, and metallurgy - as well as one of the ancient world's greatest empires, the Inka. This course offers an introduction to Andean prehistory, from the peopling of South America circa 13,000 B.P. to the Spanish Invasion of the 16th Century C.E. Throughout, we seek to understand the challenges that Andean environments presented to human societies and the often unique solutions that Andean peoples developed to deal with risk and to make sense of the world around them. Course lectures and discussions focus on recent research and major debates in Andean prehistory. Although our primary geographic focus follows the spine of the Andes from northern Ecuador to Central Chile (mapping out the maximum extent of Inka hegemony), we will frequently visit the Amazonian lowlands, as well as the southern and northern limits of the continent.