Ancient Americas: Connecting Past and Present

Though often excluded from comparative approaches to antiquity, the ancient Americas represent an essential area of inquiry for the Cunard Center. Encompassing the well-known states and cultures of North and South American, such as the Aztec, Inca, and Maya, as well as all indigenous American communities, the western hemisphere possessed its own urban fabrics, long-distance networks of communication and exchange (or “silk roads”), and succession of empires.

In addition to transregional, cross-cultural approaches, the continued presence of many groups who are the direct descendants of ancient peoples opens new avenues for comparison, across not only space but also time. This perception of antiquity as an aspect of the present, rather a period of the long-forgotten past, requires new interpretational methodologies, which may in turn prove useful to other ancient fields of inquiry.