Archaeological approaches to Landscapes: How people and things make Places and Spaces

This class introduces students to the archaeological concept of landscape as a heuristic that can be used in critical analysis. Students will learn to articulate the ways that landscapes are constituted in the process of 'living'. They will be equipped to understand how they participate in the production of landscapes, and articulate a critical understanding of these processes, including the potentials for and modalities of `resistance' and `dominance' that are inherent in them (think the wearing out of a pathway through a lawn, despite lawns ostensibly not being intended to be walked through on campus). To develop this appreciation of their role and the larger politics of the production of landscapes, this class will draw on archaeological analyses and methods that examine landscapes of varying types and scales ranging from classic landscapes like the Stone Henge, Pyramids of Egypt, and Maya urbanism, and contemporary landscapes like Ground Zero, New York, and the City of Los Angeles, to more quotidian landscapes like homesteads in colonial Australia, plantations in colonial India, United States and the Caribbean and the `ranges' of native American tribes (as processual archaeologists rendered them). It will also explore prescriptive paradigms that have informed spatial practice e.g., the cosmologies of the Maya world and South India, and the grids of modern cities. Students will learn to see spatial production as a complex and political process in which agency is enacted at multiple scales and by agents with varying kinds of agencies, ranging from the spectacular to the quotidian and human to the posthuman. They will also be introduced to a range of analytical methods that draw on cultural ecology, practice theory, political economy, phenomenology and materiality studies amongst others to examine landscapes. Students will then use these analytical methods in projects of their own for their term papers to examine landscapes of their choosing. More advanced students will be introduced to the disciplinary discussions within archaeology that contextualized each of the methods and approaches discussed in class, enabling them to articulate the contexts in which they emerged within the discipline of archaeology as a social science.