ARCH 246 - Cultural Encounters 600-1600

This course presents encounters across peoples, worldviews, belief systems, and empires, following the movement of ideas, practices, and objects to consider significant cultural transformations resulting from conflictual or peaceful interactions. From Indigenous civilizations and imperial dynasties, to sites of economic, political, and religious encounters such as the Silk Road or the Crusades. This course thematically presents creative works across all continents and includes proto-capitalist and proto-colonial phenomena. Representational, material, and spatial practices studied range from visual and oral discourses, drawing, mapping, printing, land markings, places of burials, worship, and teachings, as well as the organization of cities, landscapes, and territories, all studied as windows into ways of knowing, patterns of life and relationships to the land.