Prehispanic art

This course will provide a panorama of the principal artistic traditions and styles that developed across South America. In doing so it will address a broad range of media: from rock art, sculptures and buildings in the landscape to the carvings and friezes in stone and adobe set in architecture on the one hand, to bodily painting and modification, music and dance as well as –more prominently– objects fashioned from clay, stone, wood, shell and metals, on the other hand. The course seeks to provide a spatio-temporal, ecological and regional framework and offer tools for contextual analysis, as well as lay out principal current debates, with an emphasis on the complex societies of the Andes.