The course is organized around reading, class presentations, and critical discussions. The course will also provide students with opportunities to learn fundamental archaeological skills such as surveying, sampling strategies, remote sensing, applications of GIS to archaeology, and the creation of interpretive frameworks for a public audience.īy the conclusion of this course, each student should have acquired skills in the following areas: understanding the theoretical and methodological principles utilized in conducting landscape archaeology studies and the interpretations of data produced in such projects critical reading and assessment of particular landscape archaeology studies and the basic assumptions, theories, and methods utilized in those studies an enhanced ability to communicate in written and oral form a research design and interpretive framework for an archaeological site enhanced skills in locating and utilizing sources for landscape archaeology, including those available through libraries, the internet, research groups, and professional organizations. This course covers a range of topics within landscape archaeology that relate to core principles of the field of archaeology: methods of investigation, interpretation and modeling of results archaeological ethics and cooperative project designs working with local and descendant communities concerned with the heritage of the landscapes under study and strategies for protecting the cultural resources manifest in those landscapes. Such techniques have been utilized to study and interpret subjects as diverse as prehistoric roadways in Chaco Canyon, formal gardens of elite Anglo-American houses, spatial configurations of antebellum plantation structures and the domestic sites of enslaved laborers, and the field systems of Mesoamerican civilizations. The archaeological evidence utilized in landscape archaeology ranges across a continuum of methods including the uses of satellite and aerial imagery, ground surface surveys, topographic modeling, stratigraphic excavations, geomorphology assessments, paleoethnobotany analysis, macrofloral and microfloral studies, and ground penetrating prospection technologies. Landscape archaeology thus involves the use of archaeological, documentary, and oral history evidence to study and interpret the ways past peoples shaped their landscapes through the deployment of cultural and social practices, and the ways, in turn, that such people were influenced, motivated, or constrained by their natural surroundings. Archaeology provides invaluable tools for examining such processes, and we can provide morphological and environmental data on past landscapes that are available from no other sources. People often perceive, protect, and shape the land in the course of symbolic processes engaging with their sense of place, memory, history, legends, and the boundaries of realms sacred and profane. Human populations have engaged in a variety of processes in organizing space or altering the landscape around them for a diversity of purposes, including subsistence, economic, social, political, and religious undertakings. Landscape archeology addresses the complex issues of the ways that people have consciously and unconsciously shaped the land around them.
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