Description: Based on a region-by-region review, this module takes a broad comparative approach to the archaeology of the Americas. It examines the peopling of the Americas, the adoption of domesticates, and processes that characterise sedentary societies, especially the development and variations of socio-political complexity. Topics for discussion are likely to include variability in socio-political organisation in the late Holocene Americas; material culture, art and technology; links between environmental dimensions of subsistence systems, climate change, and landscape history; the relevance of centralization, bureaucratic control, militarism, and writing systems in complex, stratified societies of the Americas; relationships between archaeological reconstruction, linguistic and ethnographic evidence, and ethnohistorical accounts; and the role of archaeological evidence in cultural heritage and contemporary identity construction.
Students will read about and discuss some of the most important topics in the Archaeology of the Americas, developing a continent-wide perspective on different regional trajectories, and engage with key (global) research questions as exemplified by archaeological research in the Americas.
Upon successful completion of the module students will have:
- gained exposure to the archaeology of multiple regions of the Americas
- undertaken a literature review and written a synthetic essay on an aspect of the archaeology of the Americas
- acquired an understanding of how archaeological question of global relevance are examined in the archaeology of the Americas
Teaching Methods
The module will be a directed-reading course based around a combination of lectures and seminar discussions. The module will also include short one-on-one tutorial meetings with each student and visit to a museum collection (e.g. British Museum - Covid permitting).

Further information is available here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/study/graduate-taught/courses/comparative-archaeologies-americas-ii-empires-states-and-settlement