NES 2615 - [Archaeology of Empires]

(crosslisted) ANTHR 2015, ARKEO 2015
(GHB) (HA-AS) (CU-ITL)

Fall. Not offered 2017-2018. 3 credits. Student option grading.

L. Khatchadourian.

The word “empire” today evokes modern, capitalist, European, even American experiments in expansion and domination. But empires have been part of the political repertoire for millennia, which means some very old technologies of power, violence, colonialism, as well as multiculturalism and tolerance have endured, in more or less direct ways, into our contemporary world. In this course, we comparatively examine a wide range of early empires-Roman and Persian, Aztec and Inka, Assyrian and Spanish-with an eye to understanding archaeology’s unique contribution to the study of imperialisms past and present. That contribution, we shall discover, centers on the relationship between imperial power and the vast material world of things.