Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Pizza Talk: "Where Did All the Goths Go?"
2018-05-30 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Speaker: Dr. Jana Skrgulja, Visiting Scholar, UCLAThe aim of the lecture is twofold: on the one hand, to survey main archaeological sites in the area between the eastern Adriatic and the river Drava, where the remnants of the material culture ascribed to the Goths have come to light in the past hundred years or so, with particular emphasis on southern Pannonian region, as well as to present and analyze the types of artifacts found; on the other hand, to address the still ongoing debate about the relationship between material culture and ethnic identity based on the selected examples of artifacts attributed to the Goths (in opposition to the so-called ethnic ascription method). Building upon the post-processualist approach, lecture also intend to contextualize the material evidence in terms of possibilites offered by the artifacts to provide information about burial customs, social identity and gender status.

Pizza Talk: "The Iron Age and Late Antique Southern Levant: New Insights from the UCLA Ancient Agriculture and Paleoethnobotany Laboratory"
2018-05-23 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Alan Farahani, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAThis talk is a summary of the research conducted by the research participants of the Ancient Agriculture and Paleoethnobotany Laboratory at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology under the supervision of Postdoctoral Scholar Alan Farahani. Each research participant will present the results of their individual analyses on material deriving from the archaeological site of Dhiban, Jordan, inhabited ca. 1000 BCE to the present. The site of Dhiban (ancient Dibon) was the center of an Iron Age (ca. 800 – 600 BCE) polity known as Moab, and participants will present the results of archaeobotanical and artifactual analyses of a unique midden context from the most recent 2017 excavations. Moreover, laboratory members will also discuss the results of ceramic, faunal, and metallurgical analyses of material recovered from a Late Byzantine (ca. 550 CE) storeroom uncovered at Dhiban in 2013 and 2017. The cultural and historical implications of these data will be discussed with respect to the wider region of the southern Levant.

Pizza Talk: "The metalworkers of prehistoric Thailand: A bioarchaeological approach"
2018-05-16 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Chin-hsin Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cal State University, NorthridgeA specialized craft industry in prehistory is often studied from perspectives such as social organization, labor and product distribution, and exchange network. While these angles indeed provide significant insight to the past, the biological impact of craft production on community members is a critical component offering a nuanced view on people’s lifeways. Pre-industrial metalworking is a biologically and environmentally demanding process that frequently involved arduous labor, landscape alteration, and waste management. In this talk, I use a cluster of metalworking sites in prehistoric central Thailand to illustrate how each stage of the metallurgical process can manifest into skeletally detectable markers (morphological and chemical), and how these markers can lead us to understand people’s actions as they faced the consequences of a long and intensive metallurgical tradition.

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House
2018-05-12 13:00 - 16:00
The Annual Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House will take place onMay 12, 2018 from 12:00 to 4:00pm with the theme Celebrations.Join us at 12:00 pm in the Fowler Museum for two gallery talks followed by a feasting forum in the Lenart Auditorium (A-Level) at 1:00 pm. Decoding textiles: the transmission of traditional knowledge with Dr. Sonali Gupta-agarwalandArchaeology and representation: empowering descendant communities through museum-based education with Dr. Stephen AcabadoCelebrations across the world and throughout time usually involve feasting: consuming elaborate and plentiful food (and drink) in the company of others. The important social, religious and political roles of feasting will be presented and discussed by three core members of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Drs. Elizabeth Carter, Alan Farahani, and Monica Smith. After their brief introductions the panel will discuss this subject with the audience, an exchange of thought moderated by Dr. Willeke Wendrich, Director of the Institute.After the forum, come explore our labs and interact with archaeologists from 2:00 – 4:00 pm.

Friday Seminar: "Sociopolitical structure and the regeneration of the Meroitic state between the 5th cataract and Khartoum"
2018-05-11 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dr. Mohamed Ali, American Sudanese Archaeological Research CenterThe Meroitic kingdom is an ancient kingdom in Nubia, located and flourished at the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and River Atbara, in Sudan. Researchers, with no convincing evidence, have argued that tribal movements within the Meroitic territory and the Axumite invasion from the east (Ethiopia) caused the collapse of the Meroitic state. Here I consider the nature of the political economy in order to provide a better understanding of the collapse and the regeneration of the Meroitic state. I employ theoretical frameworks to the collapse of the Meroitic state, c. 350 B.C.-A.D.350, and regeneration during the Post Meroitic period (4th century to 7th century AD). I investigate how the nature and the manifestation of Meroitic sociopolitical power changes during and after the collapse of the Meroitic state.Mortuary practices and settlement patterns studies are used here to determine changes in local identity and social roles that reflect the integration and/or lack of integration of the hinterlands in the Meroitic and Post Meroitic sociopolitical systems. I demonstrate that local elites on the east bank and east hinterland re-established a polity based in the old Meroitic settlements and redeployed Meroitic symbols to legitimize and reinforce their authority and power.The locals on the west bank were not well integrated into the Meroitic sociopolitical system. They eventually became a real threat that impacted the Meroitic central power together with the Axumite threat from the east and the economic recession in the Mediterranean market. Elites on the west bank would have taken advantage of the weakness of the Meroitic central power and manipulated trade networks and formed local alliances that led to political and economic independence.

Pizza Talk: "Elizabeth Deuel's Letter: Sexual Politics in the Archives of Archaeology"
2018-05-09 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. James Snead, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cal State University, NorthridgeIn 1913 Elizabeth Deuel, a student of archaeology and resident of Los Angeles, wrote a letter to a friend describing a situation that modern readers can only interpret as sexual harassment. Coded with the discretion of the age, her brief account nonetheless resonates to modern readers conscious of the complex history of this topic in the field of archaeology.The Deuel letter is an example of scattered material in archaeological archives that documents power relationships within communities of interest in American archaeology at the turn of the last century. Her participation and subsequent activities also brought her into contact with several of the principal archaeological figures in the United States, providing considerable insight into the sexual politics of the era. This presentation examines the Deuel case, with reference to the “relevance” of the history of archaeology to issues of considerable relevance in archaeological practice.

Friday Seminar: "Tools, processes and systems for cultural heritage documentation in archaeology"
2018-05-04 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dr. Stratos Stylianidis, Aristotle University of ThessalonikiCultural heritage is our deep soul. It is the unique legacy for all societies worldwide, but at the same time our common responsibility. A value rewards humanity by providing the classical and universal principles. It provides the panhuman context of mutual understanding, respect, liberty and expression. The protection of cultural heritage is a matter for all and its recording and documentation a vital step towards preservation. The first part of this talk addresses the cultural heritage documentation context, the international framework on documentation by international charters and conventions, and the real needs that push organizations and people to operate in this process. Various sensors and platforms, both from image-based and range-based technology illuminate how scientific research and practice, transpose the real object to a 3D model. Commercial and open source tools for data processing, management and representation are presented likewise. The presentation of innovative mobile mapping systems enabling data capture and management for cultural heritage information of various scales, is closing this talk.

Excavations of Amphora Workshops in Kerkethoueris
2018-05-02 17:00 - 19:00
Speaker: Dr. Ashraf Sobhy, Fayoum Inspectorate

Pizza Talk: "Community Archaeology from Below: Major New Developments from Tell Mozan in Syria"
2018-05-02 12:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Dr. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati & Dr. Giorgio Buccellati, UCLADuring the last seven years when war has raged in Syria, foreign archaeological projects have come to an almost total standstill. But then, the question arises: what were the presuppositions that, instead of allowing archaeology to disappear or, worse, to be kidnapped by a violent iconoclastic fundamentalism, could have given archaeology an impetus in fostering stronger group identity precisely at a moment of crisis? Our talk will answer this question with reference to the site of ancient Urkesh, where we have had been excavating since 1984. We talked about it already on other occasions, but innovative projects have been burgeoning at a steady rhythm around this site. We will talk about these various new activities, and draw some conclusions about the nature of community archaeology as we have experienced it in ways that were unimaginable only a few years back: it is truly community archaeology “from below,” where the “below” includes all of us, the community of archaeologists alongside the many other communities that find themselves nurtured by the distant past embedded in their territory.

Friday Seminar: "A Critique of Archaeological Reason"
2018-04-27 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Dr. Giorgio Buccellati, Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLAThe recent publication of a book on theory (same title as this talk, Cambridge 2017), has its roots in a long and intense confrontation with the experience of field work, which began for me in Iraq and Turkey in the ’60s: it was a very practical experience which elicited, by contrast, a strong interest in theory. It was also the beginning of the digital era, which we marked with the introduction of a bulky pre-PC computer to Terqa in 1978, the first of its kind in Syro-Mesopotamia: such an early start, too, conditioned my subsequent work in this area, with an emphasis on modes of thinking beyond technology per se. Starting from these conditioning factors, I will outline the basic points of the book, as defined in the subtitle: structural, digital and philosophical aspects of the excavated record. I will then describe the structure and goals of the accompanying website, with an invitation to collaborate in its continued operation.

Persian and Greek Participation in the making of China's First Empire
2018-04-22 14:00 - 15:30
Speaker: Professor Duan Qingbo, Northwest University School of Cultural Heritage, Xi’an.Followed by a concert of Chinese and Persian music by UCLA faculty, Li Qi and Amir Pourjavady.Terra-cotta warriors, bronze chariots and horses are among the iconic artifacts associated with China’s first imperial dynasty, the Qin (221-206 BCE). Chinese archaeologist Duan Qinbo shares new evidence that suggests the material culture and social governance of the Qin may not be solely indigenous Chinese, but may also have come to China along Central Asian trade routes. *Presented by the UCLA Fowler Museum, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Department of Ethnomusicology, Boethius Initiative, Center for Chinese Studies, Confucius Institute, and Pourdavoud Center for Study of the Iranian World.

The Iron Age of Europe (800-50 BC) in a Eurasian context
2018-04-19 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Peter Wells, Professor of Anthropology, University of Minnesota

Pizza Talk: "The Bronze Age Cargo of the Cape Gelidonya Shipwreck: New Data on Maritime Trade and Metal Production in the Mediterranean"
2018-04-18 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Joseph (Seppi) Lehner, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of SydneyThe ship that sank at Cape Gelidonya (Turkey) ca. 1200 BC is one of only three known wrecks dating to the Late Bronze Age, though this was an era of intensive overseas exchange in the Mediterranean. It was also one in which metals had an importance like that of oil today, and the cargo found on the seabed at Cape Gelidonya consists primarily of copper and tin in the form of ingots and ingot fragments, along with broken bronze tools intended to be remelted and refashioned into useful implements. The ship likely belonged to a tinker traveling a circuit along the coasts of Cyprus, Syria, and southern Anatolia.The shipwreck was among the first to be scientifically excavated, when in 1960 George Bass announced to the world the exciting discoveries he made. Newer discoveries at Cape Gelidonya have now shed new light onto this important site, and cutting-edge scientific analyses of the cargo now gives us brand new insight into Bronze Age technologies and trade networks. Even more, we get a view into the life of a maritime metal at the end of the Bronze Age when the famous civilizations and empires of the Mediterranean and Near East experienced significant upheaval. Here Dr. Lehner presents the Cape Gelidonya shipwreck in its cultural and historical context, revealing how maritime cultures and trade in this crucial time period functioned and what new problems now emerge in the study of ancient societies in this dynamic region.

How Many People Does it Take to Understand a Maya Pot?
2018-04-17 18:00 - 20:00
Willeke Wendrich, Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, cordially invites Friends of Archaeology members to a special dinner and lecture on April 17, 2018 with Drs. Megan O’Neill, Associate Curator in the Art of the Ancient Americas, LACMA and Laura Maccarelli, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Conservation Science, LACMA. The reception will begin at 6:00pm and be followed by dinner at 6:45pm. This event is restricted to Friends of Archaeology. For more information about becoming a Friend, please visit our membership page.

Pizza Talk: "Construction, Use and Repair: Late Neolithic Pottery from Southeastern Albania"
2018-04-11 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Gazmend Elezi, Ph.D. Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAThe large amount of ceramic sherds in archaeological contexts and the variety of ceramic wares, shapes and dimensions during the Late Neolithic period in the Balkans is an indication that pottery was involved in many social activities. As such, it is among the best proxies to understand the daily life of Neolithic communities. In this paper, I am going to present the first preliminary results of a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach of the Late Neolithic pottery from the Korçë region in SE Albania. In order to investigate the sociocultural dimensions of the pottery, I have used a number of methods including typological and stylistic classification, ceramic petrography, X-ray analysis, and residue analysis. The first results of this study show that, although there are significant similarities between different sites, there are also technological, stylistic, and functional differences that characterize the ceramic assemblage of each settlement. The variety of pottery is also evident within each site, while there are some indications for sharing technologies between different media. The potters have used different clay sources or recipes for manufacturing their vessels, while a number of techniques were used for finishing and elaborating their surfaces. Ceramic vessels were also involved directly or indirectly in the extended exchange networks developed in the area during this period. Moreover, some of the ceramic containers seem to have an additional social value that probably was not related to their function as their life was extended by repairing them.

Visit to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
2018-04-07 10:00
Dr. John Jonson, Curator of Anthropology, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, will meet us at the museum and discuss Native American artifacts in their collection. An excursion to the Chumash Painted Cave is also planned to be included.For more information about becoming a Friend, please visit our membership page.

Himalayan Wonders Unearthed
2018-04-02 17:00 - 19:30
Himalayan Wonders Unearthed30 Years of Discoveries in India and TibetFor thirty years, Peter van Ham has been researching regions in the Himalayas that had been closed for research for over half a decade. His major research focus is the life and achievements of one of Tibet’s greatest masters – Lotsava Rinchen Sangpo, the ‘Great Translator’ from the eleventh century CE. The few surviving religious establishments founded under his aegis are the oldest temple sites of the entire TIbetan cultural realm. Their works of art, mostly preserved in their original state, are of great importance not only for TIbetan culture but also for India, Central and even Middle Asia, revealing influences reaching as far as the Mediterranean. Supported by H.H., the Dalai Lama, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the UNESCO, van Ham has made important art historical and archaeological discoveries and was the first to document these unique sites that for centuries eluded public attention. The event was livestreamed and the recording is available below.
April 2nd, 2018, 5:00 – 7:30pmLecture and Reception at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) Auditorium at UCLA570 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095Parking available at Lot 9Click here to RSVP by March 23rd, 2018

Pizza Talk: "Performance and Politics in Hittite Anatolia"
2018-03-14 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Michael Moore, PhD Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLAVirtually all studies of Hittite festivals have focused on philological issues and the cultural and religious background of the festivals (Hattic, Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian, or Mesopotamian). Studies of the roles of the participants, the political ramifications of festivals, the sensorial experience of participants, and other aspects of Hittite festivals remain unexamined. Taking the festival celebrations and sacred landscape of the Hittite capital of Hattusa as its points of departure, this talk examines the sociopolitical aspects of Hittite festivals and how spectacle was used to display and contest power in the Hittite court.

Archaeology & Anthropology Film Festival
2018-03-13 16:00 - 19:30
Please see the flyer below for the upcoming UCLA Archaeology & Anthropology Film Festival. This will take place on Tuesday, March 13 from 4:00—7:30pm in the UCLA CNSI Auditorium.Please RSVP here no later thanTuesday, March 6 at 12pm.

Friday Seminar: "Island Kingdoms of Ancient Hawai'i"
2018-03-09 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dr. Mark McCoy, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist UniversityThe archaic form of state society evolved independently at least six times in prehistory – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, and coastal Peru – and marks a turning point that was fundamental to the creation of modern society. New research suggests another, much more recent, example of the formation of archaic states occurred in the Hawaiian Islands. Located in the North Pacific, the archipelago of islands that make up the Hawaiian chain are so naturally isolated that they remained undiscovered by people until Polynesian voyagers established a new settlement there around AD 1000. By the time of first contact with Europeans, 800 years later, it was home to hundreds of thousands of people governed by independent kingdoms. How did this occur, and what does it tell us about the moment in history when chiefs became kings? In this lecture, I will draw upon nearly twenty years of field research in Hawai‘i and outline what we currently know about the creation of these island kingdoms through archaeology and local oral histories, with the goal of explaining why society transformed and what these changes tell us about the larger course of human prehistory.

Pizza Talk: "The Ancient Methone Archaeological Project: 2014-2017"
2018-03-07 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. John Papadopoulos, Professor, Department of Classics, UCLAThe final season of fieldwork on the Ancient Methone Archaeological Project—a collaboration of Greek Ministry of Culture and UCLA under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—was concluded in the summer of 2017. This presentation is an overview of our fieldwork at the site during the 2014-2017 seasons, and incorporates earlier fieldwork by our Greek colleagues beginning in 2003.

Pizza Talk: "Moving Agriculture onto the Roof of the World"
2018-02-28 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Jade d’Alpoim Guedes, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC San DiegoResearch on agriculture’s spread in East Asia has followed an underlying assumption: that farming produced equally reliable returns across the vast expanse of territories into which it spread and always placed farmers at a demographic advantage. Significant ecological barriers to growing crops on the Tibetan Plateau meant that the opposite was true. Using ecological niche modeling to illuminate how foragers and farmers interacted in environments marginal to crop cultivation, this paper demonstrates that the higher elevation reaches of the “third pole” constituted a barrier for expanding millet farmers. In these areas foragers maintained a competitive advantage. Following the end of the climatic optimum, decreasing temperatures effectively ended millet farmer’s expansion. It was only following the introduction of a suite of new crops and animals that the Tibetan economy as we know it today was able to flourish, but also that pastoralists and farmers finally began to truly encroach on forager territory.

Celebrations of Life: Gedenkschrift Symposium in Memory of Lloyd Cotsen
2018-02-25 09:00 - 20:00

Friday Seminar: "Khok Thlok, Cosmology, and Angkor as a Hydraulic City"
2018-02-23 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dr. Miriam Stark, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai’iThe Mekong Basin that Angkorian Khmers inhabited was a watery world. Annual monsoon rains dictated their farming and shaped their mobility, and short-term droughts that followed each year’s rainy season drove Khmers to dig household ponds and temple reservoirs. Chinese, Khmer and Cham histories include a Khmer origin story in which a foreign ruler conquers and marries a local serpent princess, and the bride’s father drains the local waters to create farmland for his daughter’s new dynasty. Environmental studies suggest that increasingly severe floods challenged Angkor’s urban engineers, and the decades-long droughts that followed pushed farmers on the Angkor Plain to their limits. Angkorian life revolved around water, and so did the life of its capital, but not simply in response to climate. Water has been intrinsic to Angkorian cosmology since the beginning of Khmer recorded history: simultaneously salubrious, secular and sacred. Water frames my presentation on Angkorian archaeology, which begins with the Khok Thlok origin story, examines the cosmology of water in Angkorian Cambodia, and problematizes Angkor, which BP Groslier described as his “hydraulic city”: from the household level to the urban scale. Archaeological and environmental research offer rich, and occasionally, competing perspectives on how water shaped 9th-15th century Khmers.

Pizza Talk: "Worked Animal Objects in Iron Age Greece"
2018-02-21 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Adam DiBattista, PhD Candidate, The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAThe early Iron Age was a time of profound social change in Greece in which new ideas about materials like bone and ivory develop. At the same time, textual and iconographic evidence speaks to the importance of animals and animal sacrifice in the Greek world. As the remnants of living animals, objects made from tooth or bone carry special potential for the creation and negotiation of meaning. Beginning in the Early Iron Age, these objects are frequently deposited in votive contexts where they function as a novel form of social behavior and organization based around sanctuary sites. Analysis of the technical aspects of worked animal object production helps reveal the attitudes of producers towards the materials. Additionally, contextual studies of worked animal objects reveal patterns of use and deposition of these objects.

Pizza Talk: "Burning Rings of Fire: Prehispanic Maya Lime Production and Environmental Resource Management"
2018-02-14 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Kenneth Seligson, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, USCBurnt lime was one of the most significant materials in the daily lives of the Prehispanic Maya, and yet archaeologists have uncovered relatively little evidence of production methods or locales prior to the Spanish Conquest. This talk presents the investigation of a series of pit-kilns in and around the Prehispanic site of Kiuic in the Puuc Region of the northern Maya Lowlands and highlights the multiple lines of evidence that identify these structures as lime production features. This sub-regional pit-kiln technology has implications for understanding resource management practices and the socio-economic organization of a significant Prehispanic Maya industry.

Friday Seminar: "The Past, Present, and Future of Space Archaeology"
2018-02-09 15:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Dr. Justin Walsh, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Chapman UniversityThe archaeology of human activity in space has been conceptualized since the 1990’s. Early work included definition of the parameters of the field, identification of subject material and sites, development of methodologies, and integration of common terrestrial archaeology activities such as cultural resource management and heritage protection into space archaeology. More rarely, but no less significantly, there have been research projects carried out by academic archaeologists as part of efforts to push the envelope of “the possible” in archaeological practice.This lecture will begin by outlining the history of space archaeology to date and contextualizing it within developments in the field of contemporary archaeology more generally. The author will then describe how they are undertaking the first archaeological investigation of a permanent habitation site in space: the International Space Station. The ISS Archaeological Project (ISSAP; https://issarchaeology.org) is applying the latest technological tools, including machine learning and crowd sourcing techniques, to classifying data from millions of images depicting life on board the space station during the last 17 years. This information will be used to map patterns of astronaut presence and absence in various locations, and the associations between crew, objects, and spaces on ISS. The results will enable a better understanding of how a society and culture forms on a spacecraft, and improve life during long-duration missions.

Pizza Talk: "The Manufacture and Use of Metallurgical Ceramics at Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico"
2018-02-07 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Jennifer Meanwell, Lecturer, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, MITCopper and copper alloy artifacts were valued commodities at the Postclassic period (AD 1150-1500) Maya capital of Mayapán, and are found as a variety of luxury items, most commonly small ornamental bells. Due to the lack of ore deposits near Mayapán, metal must have been imported from elsewhere in Mesoamerica, entering as a raw material for shaping into desired objects or as already finished goods. As at other Maya sites, the assemblage of metal objects at Mayapán favors common commodities such as bells, tweezers, rings, and miniature axes, but the high frequency of casting errors and the unusual preference for miniaturized bells suggest local production of desired objects using re-cast metals. The past two decades of excavation at the site has unearthed a small but growing assemblage of ceramic fragments that seem to have served as remelting crucibles and as metallurgical molds for casting.Our ongoing analysis of an exported sample of metallurgical ceramics investigates the raw materials used in manufacture, the modes of production, and the parameters of their use. We investigate the metallurgical ceramics using a variety of analytical tools, specifically ceramic petrography, electron microscopy, and chemical analyses, to demonstrate that these ceramics were used in metallurgical activities and to gain insight into their production and functionality. These highly specialized ceramic materials seem to have been produced using specific raw materials and pastes required by the intense heat and reducing atmosphere required of metallurgical production. This investigation provides insight into the localized pyrotechnical solutions developed by Mayapán’s metallurgical specialists to meet the demands of high-temperature crafting activity.

UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Graduate Student Conference
2018-02-02 16:00 - 2018-02-03 18:00

Pizza Talk: "Interpreting the Idiom of Urban Display in Architectural Relief Sculpture at the late Roman Villa of Chiragan (Haute-Garonne, France)"
2018-01-31 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Sarah Beckmann, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Classics, UCLAOver the last generation, scholarly attention towards the production of sculpture in the late antique period (ca. 250 – 550 CE) has rekindled interest in the villa of Chiragan (Haute-Garonne, Aquitaine). Since its excavation in the 19th century, Chiragan has been heralded for its statuary collection, which remains the largest extant assemblage of marble sculptures securely associated with a private context. Among the finds are a number of late antique sculptures that were ostensibly made in eastern workshops: several portraits, small scale mythological statuettes, and multiple relief series. My paper focuses on this latter genre and suggests that these under-synthesized reliefs have much to add to our understanding both of the villa of Chiragan and the marble statuary habit of late Roman villas in southern Aquitaine.
