Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House 2019
2019-05-18 11:30 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
The Annual Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House will take place onMay 18, 2019 from 11:30 to 4:00pm with the theme Technology: Ancient and ModernExplore the breadth of ancient technologies through a mosaic of talks by Drs. John K. Papadopoulos, Gregson Schachner, Monica L. Smith, and Willeke Wendrich. Then visit the labs within the Cotsen to learn more and see these technologies up close!

FRIDAY SEMINAR:Intimate plants: Constructing past identities through people’s relationships with their food
2019-05-17 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker:Christine A. HastorfUniversity of California, BerkeleyAbstract:Plants have been the most common non-human set of species that people have engaged with over human existence. While most people speak of domesticating plants, they too have domesticated us. They have formed intimate relations with us, having convinced our ancestors to settle down and care for them. At times they have become kin, moving in with us and sustaining us, like a good grandmother. How can we see these intimate relationships with plants in the past, given that they are often scarce in archaeological sites? By thinking about plants in more social ways we can begin to get closer to people’s choices, values and engagements with plants as we accept that this has been an intimate relationship since the before the palaeolithic times.Bio:Christine Hastorf is a professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She is a leading scholar in the field of paleoethnobotany. She is currently the director of the McCown UC Berkeley archaeobotany laboratory and the Archaeology Research Facility at UC. Berkeley. As archaeologist, she led archaeological work in the Andean region of South America since 1980 with focus on plantpeople relationship. Her published books include Agriculture and the Onset of political inequality before the Inka; Empire and domestic economy; Heads of State: Icons, Power, and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Her most recent book is the Social Archaeology of Food:Thinking of food in Prehistory.

PIZZA TALK: Temporalities of Reuse Monumental, Social, and Somatic Time in Adapted Buildings
2019-05-15 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Ann Marie YasinAssociate Professor of Art History and Classics USC

FRIDAY SEMINAR: The Plant-People Relationship in Ancient Central Asia
2019-05-10 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker and Bio: Elizabeth Brite is a clinical assistant professor in the Honors College, Purdue University. She is also co-director of the Khorezm Ancient Agriculture Project in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan. Dr. Brite received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA in 2011.Abstract:This talk explores the recent proliferation of studies on the plant-people relationship in ancient Central Asia. Over the last 25 years, signifi cant data sets of ancient plant remains and other dietary indicators have emerged from major and minor archaeological sites across the region. Many of the studies that have produced these data pursue a wide-ranging picture of the transmission of domesticated plants across cultures and emphasize the role of the Silk Road in shaping food globalization in prehistory. Contrasting these are other studies that examine the local, embedded, and indigenous facets of ancient plant usage and domestication within Central Asia itself. Both perspectives capture fascinating aspects of ancient human-environment dynamics in Central Asia using novel approaches. They also mirror contemporary discourse about globalization and its implications for human societies. This talk will explore these bodies of emerging scholarship and present information on new research in Central Asia aimed at addressing some of the recent trends.

PIZZA TALK: Inca Architecture and The Erasure of Women
2019-05-08 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker:Dr. Stella NairAssociate ProfessorUCLA, Dept of Art History

PIZZA TALK: Survey in the Dunes New Discoveries from an Old Archaeological Project in Sistan, Afghanistan
2019-05-01 12:00 - 13:00
William B. Trousdale is Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and Principal Investigator of the Helmand Sistan Project. Trousdale served both at the National Museum of Natural History and at the Freer Gallery in his 35 year career in archaeology.Mitchell Allen is a Research Associate at the Smithsonian and the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley, founded two archaeology-focused publishing houses, AltaMira Press and Left Coast Press, in a 40 year scholarly publishing career.Abstract:This presentation will oﬀ er a brief overview of the Helmand Sistan Project (HSP), the only multidisciplinary, long-term, comprehensive survey and excavation project ever conducted in the southwest corner of Afghanistan. In the ﬁeld in the 1970s and sponsored jointly by the Smithsonian and the government of Afghanistan, HSP identiﬁed almost 200 sites in the Sistan region– and excavated 12 of them– to establish the ﬁ rst cultural history of the region from the Bronze Age to the present, one that has not been superseded because of four decades of subsequent political and military conﬂict. With publication of this legacy project now underway, we report on a few highlights of the 5000 year history of the region, including a previously unknown early Iron Age culture and a pristine archaeological landscape from the 15th century CE.

Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies Presents: The Dig
2019-04-30 19:00 - 22:00
Please join the Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies in “The Dig,”. This award-winning one-woman play, accompanied by live music written and performed by Yuval Ron, follows an American archeologist’s journey to discover the truth about an artifact in Israel that could have transformational implications for Israel, the Middle East and the world.To RSVP, visit https://www.international.ucla.edu/israel/event/13721.

Ahmanson Lecture:“The Late Roman Villa of Santiago da Guarda (Ansião, Portugal): Architecture and Mosaics in a living palimpsest”
2019-04-28 14:00
Ahmanson lecturer, Professor Filomena Limão of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, will give her talk, “The Late Roman Villa of Santiago da Guarda (Ansião,Portugal): Architecture and Mosaics in a living palimpsest”, Sunday April 28th 2019, at 2PM in the Fowler Museum, Room A222 at UCLA.

FRIDAY SEMINAR:The Wadi Shu'aib Archaeological Survey Project: First Results from Field Research 2016−2018
2019-04-26 16:00 - 18:00
Alexander Ahrens is a Senior Researcher with the Damascus Branch, Orient Department of the German Archaeological Institute. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University (as recipient of a 2019 AIA/DAI Study in the U.S. Fellowship). He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of Bern (Switzerland), and a MA in Near Eastern Archaeology and Egyptology from the University of Tübingen (Germany). Apart from his most recent project work in Jordan, he has actively participated in excavations at several sites in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey.Title:The Wadi Shuʿaib Archaeological Survey Project: First Results from Field Research 2016−2018Abstract:The Wadi Shuʿaib Archaeological Survey Project (WSAS) was initiated in 2016. The Wadi Shuʿaib Archaeological Survey Project (WSAS) concentrates on a thorough survey and reevaluation of all archaeological and historical sites in the Wadi Shuʿaib, ranging from the Neolithic Period to the Ottoman Period, starting from immediately south of the city of as-Salt down to the city of Shuna South (Shuna as-Janubiyyah) located at the mouth of the wadi in the Jordan Valley. As part of the survey project, since 2017 excavations are carried out at the site of Tell Bleibil (Tall Bulaybil), located at the mouth of the alluvial fan of the Wadi Shuʿaib in the southern Jordan Valley.

PIZZA TALK: Athenian Pottery in the Persian empire
2019-04-24 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker:Dr. Kathleen LynchUniversity of CincinnatiAbstract:Athenian pottery was exported throughout the Mediterranean in the Classical Period. Perhaps surprisingly, it found eager consumers in the Persian Empire, or rather, in territory controlled by the Persians during the Greek Classical period. The presentation will consider what the imported Greek pottery meant in the context of the Achaemenid empire, with a special focus on Gordion in central Turkey. The former Phrygian capital turned Persian outpost is an anomaly with its abundant, high quality Athenian pottery. Typically Athenian pottery tends to be found in coastal settlements of the eastern Mediterranean, but Gordion is 500 km from any coast. What was the appeal of Athenian pottery?

PIZZA TALK: Adventures in Paleoethnobotany: from the short grass plains of North American to the Andes of South America
2019-04-17 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker:Dr. Sonia ZarrilloPostdoctoral FellowCotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAAbstract:Throughout human history, from our earliest ancestors through to modern societies, plants were of vital significance. They have been essential to diet, used as medicines and in ceremonies, fashioned into a myriad of tools, containers, adornments, and musical instruments, depicted in artwork and used as emblems, and relied on as a source of fuel and building material. Paleoethnobotany, or archaeobotany, is the study of the interrelationships between people and plants in the past. More specifically, paleoethnobotany is the recovery, analyses, and interpretation of plants from archaeological contexts to answer questions of behavior and ecological interactions between past peoples and plants. In this lecture, case studies from past and current research – from the northern Plains of North America to the South American Andes – will be presented to illustrate the range of knowledge to be gained from paleoethnobotanical studies, followed by research and volunteer opportunities for students and the interested public.

Archaeology of Ancient Israel Lecture Series: Feeding the Gods in Ancient Israel
2019-04-11 14:00 - 16:00
Dr. Jennie EbelingAssociate ProfessorDepartment of ArchaeologyUniversity of Evansville in IndianaAbstract:Bread and other grain-based foods were not only staples in the ancient Israelite diet; they were also staples in the ritual acts that accompanied the worship of several deities in ancient Israel. In addition to the state god YHWH, who required regular offerings of lechem hapanim (“bread of the presence”) in the Tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple (Exodus 25:30, 39:36, 40:23; Leviticus 24: 5-9; Numbers 4:7; 1 Kings 7:48), the Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah 7:18, 44:17-25) was worshipped by families in Jerusalem and throughout Judah with cakes that were marked with her image. Although the biblical writers did not record the details of these practices, the remains of ritual activity in a variety of Iron Age (ca. 1200-586 BCE) archaeological contexts are strongly associated with areas where bread and other foods were prepared and consumed. In this presentation, I will discuss the evidence for feeding the gods in Israelite houses, the house of YHWH, and other contexts, and suggest that the ritual importance of bread in ancient Israel began with women’s food offerings to household deities.For more details see: https://www.cjs.ucla.edu/event/feeding-the-gods-in-ancient-israel/

Occasional Lectures in Anthropology: The Powers and Pitfalls of Molecular Archaeology
2019-04-09 13:00 - 14:00
Dr. Elizabeth (Lisa) Matisoo-SmithProfessor of Biological Anthropology and ChairDepartment of Anatomy, University of OtagoThe Powers and Pitfalls of Molecular ArchaeologyIn 1989 it was announced in Nature that DNA could successfully be extracted fromarchaeological bone, and thus was born the field of molecular archaeology. The lastdecade has seen the field flourish with the development of Next Generation Sequencing(NGS) technology. While the results of many molecular studies have contributedpositively to our understanding of prehistory, others have not. It must be recognised thatmolecular techniques are just tools, and like all tools, they are only useful if usedproperly. What is most important is that the right questions are asked, the appropriatesamples to answer those questions are collected, and the results interpreted in thecontext of the current knowledge. This paper discusses the past, present and future ofmolecular archaeology, focusing on both the strengths and the weaknesses of theapplication of molecular techniques and the interpretation of molecular data withregards to reconstructing the prehistory of the Pacific.

Recent Archaeological Discoveries in Yinxu, China
2019-04-04 16:00 - 17:30

PIZZA TALK: Corral Redondo, Peru: 75 Years Later
2019-04-03 12:00 - 13:00
Corral Redondo, Peru: 75 Years LaterDr. Hans Barnard, UCLADr. Danny Zborover, Institute for Field ResearchVanessa Muros, UCLAABSTRACTCorral Redondo is located in southern Peru, where the Chorunga River joins the Ocoña River on its way from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. In 1943 Corral Redondo briefly shot to fame after local villagers discovered the site and recovered 96 Wari period (ca. 600‒1000 CE) blue-and-yellow feathered panels, stored inside eight large ceramic face-neck jars. Inka period (ca. 1450‒1550 CE) silver and bronze vessels, as well as gold and silver figurines of camelids and humans, dressed in miniature garments, were found elsewhere on the site. The type and number of artifacts found suggests that the site functioned as a ceremonial compound in both Wari and Inka times. However, because the site was looted and the finds dispersed to museums in Peru and elsewhere, all archaeological information associated with them has obviously been lost. In the summer of 2018 a team from the Cotsen Institute, the University of Chicago, the Institute for Field Research,and local archaeologists visited the Ocoña Valley to investigate and record the remains of Corral Redondo and its wider environs. In this presentation, the first results of this ongoing research endeavor will be discussed.

FRIDAY SEMINAR: Land Use and Political Economy: Niche Construction in the Gordion Region, Turkey
2019-03-15 16:00 - 18:00
Dr. Lisa Kealhofer Professor, Anthropology and Environmental Studies and Sciences, Santa Clara UniversityAbstract:Archaeologists have often assumed that agricultural strategies are significant factors in altering environments. Narratives of societal collapse typically point to environmental degradation as an outcome of population increase or political breakdown. We use a version of Niche Construction Theory to interpret the timing and nature of landscape change around Gordion in central Anatolia over the last 5000 years. Recent work in the Gordion region by us and others demonstrates that major environmental change is only weakly connected to standard measures of agricultural intensification. Using detailed stream histories and survey-based settlement data, we show that the largest environmental changes predate significant settlement in small watersheds, while the largest regional-scale changes postdate high intensity settlement and land use. By integrating multiple lines of evidence, we identify and date both environmental perturbations and possible counteractive niche construction strategies associated with political centralization.

PIZZA TALK: Bulgarian Archaeology: A Century in Review
2019-03-13 12:00 - 13:00
Ivan VasilevFounder and CEO Balkan Heritage FoundationABSTRACT:Occupying the eastern part of the Balkans along the Western Black Sea shore, Bulgaria has a rich and diverse archaeological heritage. Within its borders are the remains not only of the early humans and Neolithic farmers, but also of the arguably Europe’s oldest civilization dating to the 5th millennium BCE. A very significant share of the country’s archaeological heritage belongs to the civilizations of the ancient Thracians, Greeks, Macedonians and even Persians as well as Celts, Romans, Byzantines, medieval Bulgarians and Ottomans. The country has more than 150,000 registered archaeological sites, thousands of historic sites and millions of archaeological artifacts kept in around 300 museums and collections, which means Bulgaria ranks with Greece, Italy and France as Europe’s archaeologically richest countries.Bulgaria’s archaeological heritage received the interest of European scholars in the second half of the 19th century, not much before the country received autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. However, the beginning of the archaeological investigation in the country dates to both decades around the turn of the century (1890s-1900s). It was encouraged and supported backed-up and triggered by the development of relevant research and museum infrastructure across the country. The National Archaeological Museum was established in 1892 and the Bulgarian Archaeological Society (later National Archaeological Institute) was established in 1901.Archaeologists have been unearthing the evidence about the past of these lands for more than a century. The current presentation will review their greatest achievements and discoveries while introducing the country’s rich potential for research. It will start with a review of the finds from Kozarnika Cave – one of the earliest Paleolithic sites in Europe, the “world’s oldest gold” found in Varna and the richest collection of Attic vases outside Athens. Then it will highlight treasures and tombs of Thracian royalty along with important monuments and cities of ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and medieval Bulgarians.

FRIDAY SEMINAR:Giving Voices - Without Words - To Prehistoric People
2019-03-08 16:00 - 18:00
Dr. Ruth TringhamProfessorGraduate School (Anthropology)UC BerkeleyABSTRACT:This presentation describes a path to addressing the discomfort that I and many of my braver colleagues have had when putting words into the mouths and heads of prehistoric actors, knowing that these words say more about us than they do about prehistory. Yet without such speech, how are we archaeologists and the broader public to imagine the intangibles of the deep past (emotions, affect, gender, senses)? Moreover, such words create a misleading certainty that conceals the ambiguities of archaeological data. Are there alternative options to verbal and vocal clarity when creating imagined fictive narratives about the past? With inspiration from composer Györgi Ligeti, from linguists and experimental psychologists, and from ASMR performers, I explore the emotive power of vocal non-verbal interjections and utterances that have more universality and less cultural baggage, using them in three diverse remediations of digital media from three prehistoric archaeological contexts in Europe and Anatolia.

PIZZA TALK: In the Beginning there was the Carved Lion-man from Swabia: On Histories about the Fuss about the ‘First’
2019-03-06 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Avinoam ShalemDepartment of Art History and ArchaeologyColumbia UniversityAbstract:In this lecture, I would like to challenge the specific art historians’ interest in the question of the earliest and the first-in-sequence work of art. My inquiry does not aim at disregarding this query as a legitimate one or criticizing the art historian’s obsession with this mode of investigation. On the contrary, I would like to ponder on the benefit that art historians gain from locating specific art works as the earliest or the first of their kind. Moreover, I would like to disclose the historical trajectory of this method, namely the first medieval scholarly quests for defining and demarcating the earliest. Thus, my aim is to set this mode of research in its historical context and, hopefully, raise further critical points about our regarding of this approach as scholarly method, for its bad and good reasons alike.

PIZZA TALK: Uncertainty and Ethics
2019-02-27 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Jonathan Ashley-SmithGetty Conservation Guest ScholarAbstract:This presentation will discuss the inevitability of prediction in conservation activities.Routine activities such as condition assessment and risk assessment rely on the ability topredict future environments and future physical and chemical states of objects. Yet for theresults to be useful they have to be presented as positive statements that hide the hugeuncertainties in such predictions. Codes of conservation ethics imply predictions about thefuture behaviours of people and objects. Despite the inherent uncertainties of suchpredictions, such codes have become the bedrock of the conservation profession.

FRIDAY SEMINAR: The ancient town of Edfu from the Old Kingdom to the early New Kingdom: New discoveries of the 2017 and 2018 seasons
2019-02-22 16:00 - 18:00
Nadine Moeller Associate Professor of Egyptian ArchaeologyUniversity of ChicagoAbstract: The ongoing excavations by the Oriental Institute team directed by Nadine Moeller and Gregory Marouard have during the most recent seasons focused on settlement remains dating to the Old Kingdom. Located 20 m to the west of the much later Ptolemaic temple of Horus of Edfu, excavations revealed several phases of domestic installations from the second part of the 6th Dynasty that covered an older administrative complex with several massive mudbrick structures dating to the late 5th Dynasty that had been installed directly onto the natural Nile sand deposits in an area never settled before that date. Based on their size, architectural details and related finds, the two large buildings are of official nature and constitute a newly founded settlement quarter in the ancient town of Behdet (Edfu). Among the finds are more than 220 clay sealings naming king Djedkare-Isesi (late 5th Dynasty, ca. 2434 BC), in addition to official titles that regularly mention a group of specialized workers involved in prospection and mining activities, the so-called sementiu. Additional finds such as numerous pieces of copper ore, important traces of metallurgical activities, Red Sea shells and a significant amount of Nubian ceramics found on the floor levels during the excavation further confirm the link to royal expeditions and mining activities in the Eastern desert areas. The second area that has been the focus of fieldwork since November 2018 provided new evidence for a vast domestic quarter dating to the beginning of 18th Dynasty. Excavations have focused on a large urban villa of about 400 square-meters, which dates from the early Thutmoside period (ca. 1500-1450 BCE). This building is characterized by several rooms with columns. The largest and main room, a 6-columned hall, contained in one of its corners a well-preserved domestic sanctuary dedicated to the cult of the family ancestors. Numerous elements attesting to the cult activity have been found near a small fire place and offering table, including a very rare example of an ancestor bust and a statuette of a seated scribe

PIZZA TALK: LA MINA A LOOTED MOCHE TOMB
2019-02-20 12:00 - 13:00
Christopher Donnan, Ph.D.UCLA Professor EmeritusAbstract:This talk focuses on an extraordinarily rich Moche tomb that was looted on the north coast of Peru, the efforts that were made to record the objects that came from it, and how it was possible to learn about its location, construction, and embellishment.

FRIDAY SEMINAR: The Tyranny of Ethnonyms in Multiethnic Worlds
2019-02-15 16:00 - 18:00
Dr. Stacie KingAssociate Professor of AnthropologyAssociate Faculty for the Center forLatin American and Caribbean StudiesIndiana University BloomingtonAbstract:This talk explores the challenges that ethnonyms create when trying to reconstructhistories of multiethnic landscapes in the ancient world. My larger project in the Nejaparegion of Oaxaca, Mexico addresses various aspects of conquest and colonialism alonginteregional trade routes, including identifying fortresses in mountain landscapes, themeaning of unoccupied land, the relationships entailed by trade and exchange, andreconciling archival documents, oral history, and archaeology. In this talk, I use my workto demonstrate how ethnonyms have pervaded interpretations of the past, archaeologicalreconstructions, and Colonial period registers, such that it remains difficult to envision adifferent kind of thriving, multiethnic world. Taken together, archaeological data, archivalinformation, and oral history from rural multiethnic Nejapa, Oaxaca show us thatdifferent indigenous communities across this landscape experienced Aztec, Zapotec, andSpanish conquests and colonialisms differently between the years A.D. 1350 and 1650, andthat these differences do not fit well with traditional reconstructions of Nejapa’sindigenous ethnic groups (Mixe, Chontal, and Zapotec). Instead, the data complicateentrenched notions of ethnicity and challenge their basic formulation. The long-standingmultiethnic past of ancient Nejapa set the stage for a different form of indigeneity thatNejapa’s resident experience in the present.

PIZZA TALK: All the Small Things: Artifacts in Urban Context
2019-02-13 12:00 - 13:00
Dr. Leigh LiebermanDepartment of HistoryClaremont McKenna College AbstractIn recent years, the study of ancient artifacts has moved beyond straightforward typologies, descriptions, and quantifications. New approaches to the analysis of material culture – including methods of geospatial referencing, artifact agency, object biography, and statistical analysis of large datasets – have drawn attention to the myriad ways in which objects could be used and reused, deposited and redeposited in the ancient world. These new approaches have consequently given new life to materials that have been long overlooked in busy storerooms, from iron nails to loom weights, from ceramic wasters to unidentifiable coins. However, no matter the classification method, scholars still by and large fail to situate all the artifacts from a site fully within their archaeological contexts, a term that is frequently discussed in published reports but often thoroughly misunderstood. In both excavation publications and museum displays, the intended use of an object is almost always prioritized when in fact a contextual approach to the study and presentation of artifacts and assemblages can better illustrate the multiple, varied roles that objects served in the ancient world.As the Manager of Data and Information Resources for the University of Cincinnati’s Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia (PARP:PS), the Data Supervisor for the American Excavations at Morgantina: Contrada Agnese Project (AEM:CAP), and the Head of Materials for the University of Cincinnati’s Tharros Archaeological Research Project (TARP), I have facilitated the development of a robust data organizational scheme that guides our innovative approach to material culture. I argue that by prioritizing context in the analysis of artifacts and assemblages, we can come to a more nuanced interpretation of how everyday objects were used, discarded, and recycled in urban spaces in antiquity. In my presentation, I’ll be highlighting some of the important lessons that I have learned along the way.

A Painted Landscape: Myth and Ritual in Lower Pecos Rock Art
2019-02-12 18:00 - 20:30
The Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico house some of the most spectacularly complex rock art of the ancient world. Approximately 4000 years ago, hunter-gatherers began transforming this region into a painted landscape. Perhaps the greatest of these masterpieces is the White Shaman mural, an intricate Pecos River style painting that spans twenty-six feet in length and thirteen feet in height. Drawing on twenty-five years of archaeological research, as well as insight from ethnohistory and art history, Carolyn Boyd identifies patterns in the art that relate, in stunning detail, to the mythologies of Uto-Aztecan speaking peoples, including the Aztec and the contemporary Huichol. Analysis of these patterns led to the identification of the White Shaman mural as an ancient visual narrative relating a story of the birth of the sun and the beginning of time.California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA570 Westwood Plaza Building 114Los Angeles, CA 90095Reception on Tuesday, February 12, 2019 at 6:00pm with the program at 7:00pm RSVP here Carolyn E. Boyd, Ph.D.Founder of Shumla Archaeological Research & Education CenterResearch Professor at Texas State

PIZZA TALK: Long-term Settlement Histories and Early Village Formation in the Northern Southwest
2019-02-06 12:00 - 13:00
Gregson Schachner & Reuven SinenskyAbstract:Ancestral Pueblo communities in the American Southwest underwent dramatic transformations in the mid-1st millennium AD, including rapid population growth and the widespread adoption of social structures that remained in place over the next millennium. We explore to two key moments in this process: the widespread adoption of sedentary agriculture in the mid-6th century and the founding of the earliest aggregated villages during the 8th century. While the former transition is marked by abrupt changes in architecture, storage facilities, and technological traditions region-wide, the latter displays remarkable diversity. Drawing on recent excavations and high quality chronometric and paleoclimate data, we suggest that a severe climatic downturn brought about by a series of massive volcanic eruptions is in part responsible for the abrupt changes associated with the onset of the Neolithic Demographic Transition in the northern Southwest during the mid-AD 500s, while a myriad of entangled economic and social factors contributed to the formation of early population aggregates a little over a century later.

PIZZA TALK:Climate Change, Cultural Heritage and Human Social Trajectories: An Archaeological Perspective from Holocene Central Sahara
2019-01-30 12:00 - 13:00
Savino di LerniaDirector, The Archaeological Mission in the SaharaDirector, The Archaeological Mission in the Kenyan Rift ValleySapienza University of Rome, ItalyAbstractClimate changes are a serious threat to cultural and natural heritage. Although many contexts are today seriously endangered, recent studies highlight how “archaeology and cultural heritage threatened by anthropogenic climate change are not just victims but part of the solution” (Hambrecht & Rockman, 2017. American Antiquity). Long-term archaeological projects could provide evidence to better understand the nature of the relations between climatically driven environmental changes and social trajectories. Aim of this talk is to present a synthesis of the main Holocene climate and environmental variations from a privileged geographical context – the central Sahara, where the magnitude of these changes was huge –, with a special focus on the Tadrart Acacus and Messak region (SW Libya). Here, cultural and social trajectories go together with resilient mechanisms of adaptations. Archaeological evidence reveals that social strategies were pivotal in coping with environmental changes. Although it is certainly true that climate changes are in fact central elements in cultural trajectories, in the past as today, this is even truer for marginal ecosystems such as the changing landscapes of the Holocene central Sahara. However, the continuity of many cultural practices until historical times and even later shows how the Saharan tradition is indeed an extraordinary way of life that deserves specific attention.

PIZZA TALK: Epigraphy in the Block Yard at Tell Edfu: Problems and Result
2019-01-23 12:00 - 13:00
Jonathan WinnermanLecturer, UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures ABSTRACT:Begun in 2012, the goal of the Block Yard Project at Tell Edfu is to organize, conserve, and document the wealth of epigraphic material discovered in the settlement site to the west of the well-known Ptolemaic temple. Prior to the present study, many of the objects were simply abandoned at the base of the site, deemed unworthy for inclusion in a museum by early excavators. Yet, these objects reveal a great deal about Egyptian religious practices, especially in the community outside of the temple itself. This talk first discusses epigraphic methodology and the options available for the documentation of this or other, similar material. It next provides an overview of some of the most interesting results, focusing specifically on the remains of a distinctive structure of unknown design and purpose.

PIZZA TALK:Early globalization? Isotopic evidence of food practices in Prehistoric Italy
2019-01-16 12:00 - 13:00
Early globalization? Isotopic evidence of food practices in Prehistoric Italy Mary Anne TafuriDepartment of Environmental Biology, Sapienza University of RomeThe cultural and social importance of food goes far beyond the mere necessity of nutrition, yet archaeologists have been slow to tackle issues of the sociality of food in prehistory. This is a great loss particularly as the economic transformations, which structured human diet took place in prehistory. One reason for lack of attention to this question has been limited methodologies for investigating not only what foods were produced but also exactly what foods people consumed.The increasing application of biomolecular investigations of skeletal tissues offers an exceptionally valuable approach for directly assessing aspects of an individual’s life, including their diet, geographical origin as well as the climate they inhabited.In the Central Mediterranean a number of important economic questions can be addressed through isotopic investigations: we can explore the balance between plant and animal sources of food in the diet of prehistoric people and how this change between the onset of the Neolithic (ca. 6000 BC) and the end of the Bronze Age (ca. 900 BC). We can assess the relative contribution of marine resources to diet the Central Mediterranean and, further, we can identify mode and tempo for the use of new foods.This talk will present new isotopic data on a large set of sites from prehistoric Italy that span from the earliest phases of the Neolithic to the later Bronze Age. A pattern of great complexity emerges, showing profound differences between the northern and southern regions of the Peninsula, which can be associated with environmental aspects but mostly should be interpreted as different cultural practices across space and time.

PIZZA TALK: The Challenges of Studying the Agricultural Landscapes of Petra
2019-01-09 12:00 - 13:00
Felipe Rojas SilvaAssistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and AssyriologyBrown University
