AIS 101 - American Indian Culture before European Contact

• Identify basic principles and institutions that underlie American Indian society and their cultures (e.g., settling Americas, adaptations to changing environments, origin of agriculture, emergence of complex social systems.)
• Use archaeology, ethno-history, and American Indian Oral history to describe theories about individuals, social processes, social networks, and cultural processes (e.g., adaptation to climate change, creation and maintenance of trade and exchange systems).
• Analyze American Indian cultural adaptations and oral histories containing their perspectives using anthropological and archaeological theory and research.
• Articulate ways that pre-contact American Indian social diversity shapes attitudes and values affecting modern views of Native American society and culture, past and present.
• Explain how human actions impact issues of sustainability at the individual/community/organization/societal levels by applying archaeological and oral tradition methods of inquiry.
• Demonstrate knowledge about how American Indian food getting systems and traditional ecological knowledge affected sustainability of their lifeways using archaeological, anthropological and oral tradition to evaluate the validity of arguments and research.