RAVE: Claudia Brittenham
How to narrate an interconnected Mesoamerican world
The Mesoamerican world was always cosmopolitan. Trade, migration, and pilgrimage linked together different regions of this linguistically and ethnically diverse territory throughout its history. Yet our models emphasize closed cultural units, casting instances of intercultural exchange as exceptional moments rather than a baseline expectation for human experience. How might Mesoamerican history look different if we were to turn this model inside out, and assume that interconnection was the norm, rather than the exception? In this talk, I present preliminary suggestions for how these new perspectives let us see pressures for assimilation, the round trip of ideas, and entangled webs of exchange, especially in the realm of artistic production.
Speaker: Claudia Brittenham (Associate Professor of Art History and the College and Interim Director of the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Chicago)
This event is co-sponsored by RAVE and presented by the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop. If you have any questions or would like the zoom meeting information, please email losilva@uchicago.edu and ngrigg@uchicago.edu.