ARTH 108
Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous South America and the Caribbean Spring 2025
Division I
Cross-listed AMST 108

This course introduces students to the art and architecture of ancestral Indigenous and Native South America. It will consider the artistic productions of several pre-contact and early colonial cultures that emerged in the Andes, Amazonia, the Southern Cone, and the Caribbean. Cultures to be addressed include Chavín, Nazca, Moche, Tiwanaku, Inca, Casarabe, Tupi-Guarani, Cocle, Taíno, and Mapuche, among others. Students will learn not only about these cultures but also the sources and methods by which present-day scholars have come to know of their complexity. Artforms to be addressed will include ceramics, murals, sculpture, khipu, tocapu, feather work, shell work, sacred architecture, residential architecture, and settlement. This is one half of a two-course sequence that also includes, “Arts of Ancestral Native and Indigenous North America,” and may be taken in any order or independently.