The Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean: Paleoenvironmental, Archaeological, and Textual Evidence

Speaker: Dafna LanggutCores obtained from the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee were used to reconstruct past climate conditions in the Levantine region during the Bronze and Iron Ages. The records were studied in high resolution for their lithological and palynological patterns. Their chronological framework is based on radiocarbon dating of short-lived organic material. […]

How Ancient Israel Began: A New Archaeological Perspective

Over the last hundred years or so, a number of theories have been proposed to explain the origins of ancient Israel. All these have been informed to some degree by the biblical text and all have considered the role of New Kingdom Egypt and the collapse of empires throughout the Near East circa 1200-1100 BCE. […]

Pizza Talk: “Changing Configuration of Porcelain Production in Jingdezhen: Excavation of the Luomaqiao Kiln Site”

Speaker: Dr. Yanjun Weng, Assistant Professor, Jingdezhen UniversityDr. Weng will speak about his current archaeological excavation project at the Luomaqiao Kiln site in Jingdezhen, a city with more than 1,000 years of continuous ceramic industry history. This lecture will explore the changing configuration of porcelain production along the long timeline as well as the corresponding distribution of […]

Friday Seminar: “Developing new digital tools for landscape archaeological research”

Speaker: Dr. Marcos Llobera, University of WashingtonThis talk centers on the on-going Landscape, Encounters and Identity project (http://leiap.weebly.com/) and various initiatives by members of the DigAR lab (Digital Archaeology Research Lab -www.digarlab.uw.edu/) at the University of Washington surrounding this project. Broadly speaking, the LEIA project is a landscape archaeology study that seeks to understand landscape […]

Pizza Talk: “Longshan Network and Political Landscape of Early Bronze Age China

Speaker: Tao Shi, PhD Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAThe rise of Erlitou not only declares the end of the Longshan Age, but also open a new era of the Luoyang-centric social network. However, how the political landscape was formed and what  the knowledge root of Erlitou was have not been discussed. In this paper, […]

Friday Seminar: “Density, Defense, Agriculture and Access: Lessons from LiDAR in the Maya lowlands”

Speaker: Dr. Thomas Garrison, Ithaca CollegeIn 2016, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) acquired over 2100 square km of data over the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, representing the largest single LiDAR acquisition for archaeological research. Sponsored by PACUNAM, a consortium of scholars representing different archaeological projects and nationalities have come together to […]

Pizza Talk: “Bioarchaeological investigations in China and Mongolia: Mongol soldiers, Silk Road merchants, Manichaean infants, and bound feet women”

Speaker: Dr. Christine Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cal State LAMy research focuses on ethnic identity and how it is expressed in the human skeleton and its burial context. The populations I study were seldom represented in contemporary historical texts. These people included nomadic pastoralists, migrants and merchants, and finally women and children. The first population sample […]

Friday Seminar: “Snake Queens and Statecraft: Kaanul Women and their Political Legacies at Waka'”

Speaker: Dr. Olivia Navarro-Farr, College of WoosterRecent investigations in Waka’s primary civic-ceremonial structure discovered a royal tomb including the remains of Queen K’abel. These excavations also revealed the name of an earlier, previously unknown Kaanul queen, Ikoom Sak Wayis, likely pertaining to the interment of a royal female excavated at the site’s palace complex in 2004. This discussion focuses on the wide-ranging evidence that underscores […]

Friday Seminar: “Destroying the Archive: Sex, Racism, Image and Contemporary Archaeology

Speaker: Dr. Doug Bailey, Professor, Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State UniversityWhat happens when people attempt to discard and destroy a museum archive that contains many thousands of visual and material objects? In this workshop, we discuss the politics, potential, and violence of archive objects (specifically a cache of over 1200, 35-mm transparencies from the mid-late […]

Vertical Archaeology, Horizontal Stratigraphy: A Century of LA Graffiti

Willeke Wendrich, Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, cordially invites Friends of Archaeology members to a special dinner and lecture on January 16, 2018 with Susan Parker, Academic Director, Pitzer in Ontario Program Associate Professor of Environmental Analysis Pitzer College, Claremont, CA. The reception will begin at 6:00pm and be followed by […]