Courses

This graduate seminar is designed to explore the disciplinary overlaps—as well as the methodological and theoretical chasms—between the fields of art history (especially “Pre-Columbian” or “ancient American”) and archaeology (especially in the Americas). Our semester-long investigation will center questions around images: What are they? How are they “read”? What do they do? What do they “want”? What role have they had and do they continue to have—as subjects, objects, and proxies for something else—in practices of art history and anthropological archaeology of the last century or so? We will divide the course into three parts: the first a series of engagements with now-classic texts in these two fields, the second an exploration of new and emerging scholarship on the horizons, and the third the presentation of original research by seminar members.