Brown University is offering two Destination Courses this January that may be of particular interest for archaeology students, and both classes will be cross-listed as Archaeology and the Ancient World courses:

HIAA 1191 - Living and Material Landscapes of the African Diaspora
Professors: Itohan Osayimwese and Matthew Reilly
Location: Barbados   Dates: January 2 - January 17, 2018 (Travel Dates: January 5-16)
Description: Designed to be interdisciplinary, this course will incorporate historical, archaeological, architectural, and anthropological perspectives in order to critically investigate the living legacies of the sugar and slavery colonial system. Visits to historic and cultural sites around the island will challenge students to think about heritage practices, postcolonial development, and diasporic cultures. Through a partnership with the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, students will have the opportunity to visit heritage sites, analyze material culture from archaeological sites, and assess architectural preservation efforts with a critical eye towards the ways in which the afterlives of sugar and slavery make themselves present on the island landscape.

AMST 1906I - Decolonizing Museums: Collecting Indigenous Culture in Taiwan and North America
Professor: Caroline Frank
Location: Taiwan   Dates: January 2 - January 19, 2018 (Travel Dates: January 5-16) 
Description: This course is a comparative examination of ethnographic collections in Taiwan and North America.  Academic institutions in both the Republic of China and North America house aging collections of indigenous objects, accumulated during periods of colonization and under the rubric of the emerging discipline of Anthropology and Ethnology.  In hands-on and virtual examinations of museum collections, nearby and across the Pacific, students follow ethnographic artifacts from useful circulation to glass cabinets to indigenous cultural heritage sites. Students explore collecting and representation strategies of “ethnic” objects in relation to colonialism, decolonization, ethnic politics, and nationalism.