Professor Cheetham is an intense guy. He has a lot of passion for his work and is clearly in love with his field of study. He provides students with a textbook which he puts together himself and requests only the printing cost. His lectures often go off onto tangents, but he is immensely personable and entertaining, plus he will send email PDFs of anything he didn't get to in class, so you are never behind on the material.

Assignments were: 1) a map project in which you draw and illustrate a map with various sites which will be covered in class so you have a working knowledge of the geography of each place, 2) a final research paper on a topic of your choosing from pre-colonial Mesoamerica, 3) a midterm, and 4) a final.

He was a generous grader on the map and paper assignments, and while the midterms and finals were more dense than anticipated by most of my class, he offered enough extra credit to even out the tougher questions. With the additional extra credit and harder studying for the final, I was able to maintain an A in the course.

PS Ask him about his time on the History Channel show "Ancient Aliens"!