First Peoples - Americans From the Ice Age to 1500 AD

Description

We will study the whole span of time for which we have good evidence that people lived in the Americas before European contact. We want to know about when people reached the Americas and where they came from, where they traveled and settled, the societies that developed, the responses of these societies to ongoing environmental changes, and human impacts on the landscape. We will draw on genetic studies, archaeology, palaeobotany, geology, palaeoclimatology, and liguistics. Emphasis throughout will be on learning what kinds of evidence tell us about our past and how that evidence is obtained and interpreted.