Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Pizza Talk: "Longshan Network and Political Landscape of Early Bronze Age China
2017-11-29 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
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, I will discuss the Longshan Network as the process of knowledge preparation for the rise of Erlitou. Moreover, I will introduce my survey in the Qinling Mountain Range, and see the Dan River in the Qinling Mountain Range as an expressway of knowledge transmission for the Erlitou state.

Friday Seminar: "Developing new digital tools for landscape archaeological research"
2017-11-17 16:00 - 18:00
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 and societal changes that played out from Pre-(Late Bronze Age) to medieval times in the Son Servera landscape (NE Mallorca, Spain). In addition to representing the first intensive and systematic surface survey in the island of Mallorca, the project has set out to meet several theoretical, methodological and public goals. Amongst the methodological goals, the project is developing new digital and computational tools for collecting, describing and analyzing survey and landscape data.

Pizza Talk: "Changing Configuration of Porcelain Production in Jingdezhen: Excavation of the Luomaqiao Kiln Site"
2017-11-15 12:00 - 13:00
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 products to royal needs, government divisions, and civilian markets of both domestic China and overseas.Yanjun Weng obtained his PhD in archaeology in 2017 from Peking University and has been active on field works of Chinese ceramic archaeology since 2010. Before that, he received master’s and undergraduate’s degrees in economics and international trade.

How Ancient Israel Began: A New Archaeological Perspective
2017-11-14 16:00 - 17:30
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. The lecture will present a radical new proposal: that Egypt itself instigated “Israelite” settlement.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean: Paleoenvironmental, Archaeological, and Textual Evidence
2017-11-13 16:00 - 18:00
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. The detailed paleoclimate reconstruction points to a dramatic dry event in the later phase of the Late Bronze Age, around the middle of the 13th century BCE. This pronounced dry phase lasted about 120 to 150 years, and was followed by much wetter climate conditions during the Iron Age I. The increasing humidity enabled the expanding of agricultural activities in the area (e.g., cereals, olive). The Iron Age II was characterized by a slight decrease in humidity. This new high resolution paleoclimate reconstruction helps to better understand the so-called “Crisis Years” in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as quick recovery in the Iron I, including the emergence of new entities in the highlands regions of the Levant. It also shed light on the economic strategies of the region’s ancient settlers (e.g., agriculture, grazing).

Pizza Talk: "In Search of the First Dynasty: Archaeological Landscapes and the Spatialization of History in Early China"
2017-11-08 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Li Min, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UCLAIn this lecture Dr. Li Min will discuss the current trends of Chinese archaeology based on his observations of the conference “In Search of Early China through Archaeology: Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of Chinese Archaeology at UCLA” co-sponsored by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. This review of current state of research is followed by a re-visit to the highly contentious topic of the Xia (ca. 2100-1600 BCE), the first dynasty in Chinese historiography and the fountainhead of many important political institutions in Bronze Age China. Instead of debating on the historicity of this legendary regime and the stages of evolutionary typology, Dr. Li Min will approach this topic from the perspective of political experimentation and social memory by asking these questions: What made the late third millennium BCE an important watershed in sociopolitical history of China as seen through the archeological lens? What were the contributions of the Longshan and Erlitou legacy of the early second millennium BCE to the emergence of the Shang civilization during the late second millennium BCE? How was the social memory of the pre-Shang legacy transmitted to the Zhou society at the end of the second millennium BCE? How did the Zhou narratives about the Xia civilization correlate to the archaeological landscape of the second millennium BCE? Against the backdrop of societal collapse in lowland Neolithic centers and intensified interactions with Eurasian exchange networks among the highland communities, I argue that the emergence of major Longshan centers in highland basins during the late third millennium BCE and the subsequent rise of the first Bronze Age city at Erlitou in the Luoyang Basin during the early second millennium BCE had critical contribution to the formation of the Xia legacy in Zhou storytelling about the past. Far from a myth invented by the Zhou to justify its conquest of Shang, the pre-Shang legacy served as major source of political knowledge for the Zhou state-building enterprise and the Xia corresponded to a culturally constructed constellation of political concepts, institutions, and social memories of different episodes of state building from the Longshan and Erlitou periods.

Friday Seminar: "TOPADA and the Land of Tuali: the age of experimentation in the aftermath of the Hittite Empire"
2017-11-03 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Lorenzo d’Alfonso, New York UniversityDrawing upon textual and archaeological data, one can reconstruct the formation of a post-Hittite political entity in Cappadocia, the Land of Tuali, during the late 12th century BCE. This entity grew larger and more structured by the late 10th and 9th centuries before being substantially reduced by the late 8th century expansion of the Assyrian empire toward the northwest. Expanding from this central Anatolian case study, this talk will examine the historical processes that characterized the aftermath of the Hittite empire in Anatolia and the northern Levant and connect them to the fragility, collapse, and regeneration of early polities.

Pizza Talk: "Alcohol and Drugs in Pre-Modern India"
2017-11-01 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Professor James McHugh, Associate Professor, School of Religion, USCProfessor James McHugh explores the complex world of drinks and drinking in pre-modern India. From rice wine to palm toddy, a huge variety of drinks were made. In the early centuries of the common era, another drug—betel—joined the mix too, though cannabis and opium appeared much later. How and where were these drinks and drugs consumed? Were they forbidden or permitted? How did medical scholars think they worked? And how are they related to religion and mythology?

Friday Seminar: "The Quest of Ancient Carthage: Antiquarism, diplomacy, and politics in 19th century Tunisia"
2017-10-27 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Ridha Moumni, Institut de Recherche sur le Magreb ContemporainIn Tunis, the first collections of antiquities were established in the 18th – 19th centuries. European Consuls, foreign scholars, and international traders acquired most of the archaeological remains then available from the ancient city of Carthage. Whether growing out of their personal taste, commercial considerations, or a desire for cultural distinction, they enriched the collections of major European museums. This collecting practice was not limited to foreigners, but also touched the local ruling class. Ministers and the Bey himself constituted rich collections, the most famous of which belonged to the main Tunisian families of the 19th century. The result of ongoing sustained effort, these collections had a notoriety exceeding the country, guaranteeing the fame of their owners on a transnational level, as when they were exhibited in World’s Fair of 1855 and 1873. The Tunisian ruling class quickly became aware of the stakes of their cultural heritage, formerly ignored, which became an important referent of national identity before the French colonization in 1881.

Pizza Talk: "Towards an Archaeology of Extensive Pastoralism in the Great Artesian Basin in Australia"
2017-10-25 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Timothy Murray, Charles La Trobe Professor of Archaeology, La Trobe UniversityIn this talk, Dr. Murray will briefly outline the essence of a new interdisciplinary research project exploring the historical archaeology of extensive pastoralism in Australia, with a particular focus on the Western Division of New South Wales. Core elements of the project span conventional ecological history (especially the impact of sheep and cattle grazing on the rangelands of the region), as well as the history of wool as a global commodity, the impact of the dispossession of indigenous people by European settlers, and the impact of new technologies such as fencing, railways, but particularly drilling for artesian water. The research project thus considers many elements of a more general inquiry into the ecological and economic impacts of the creation of both national and imperial entities (and identities) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around the globe.

In Search of Early China through Archaeology: Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of Chinese Archaeology at UCLA
2017-10-21 09:00 - 17:30

Friday Seminar: "Archaeology: Between the Time of Antiquity and the Antiquity of Time"
2017-10-20 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Witmore, Texas Tech UniversityThis talk attempts to formulate a different theory of time. Whereas time is often honored with an astounding primacy by history and archaeology, actual things cannot be reduced to the aftereffects of time. Rather, the rapports, exchanges, and mergers between actual entities – Bronze-Age bridges and nineteenth-century cart roads, stonemasons and ashlar masonry, potters and ancient ceramic forms – are generative of time. In developing a different theory of time, one that stands as an alternative and complement to history, archaeology expands from sorting out the time of antiquity to working with the sorting that is the antiquity of time.

Soldiers and Kings: Violence, Representation and Photoethnographic Practice in the Context of Human Smuggling Across Mexico
2017-10-18 17:00 - 20:00
Since 2015 Jason De León has been involved in an analog photoethnographic project focused on documenting the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting undocumented migrants across Mexico. In this talk, he will discuss the relationship between transnational gangs and the human smuggling industry and outline the complicated role that photography plays as a field method and data source in this violent and ethically challenging ethnographic context. Jason De LeónAssociate Professor of Anthropology,University of MichiganDirector, Undocumented Migration Project California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI)Wednesday, October 18, 20175:00 p.m.Reception to followPlease RSVP to this event here. This Public Lecture is co-sponsored by:Professor and Director Willeke Wendrich, UCLA Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyThe Mellon Foundation’s Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLAProfessor and Chair Jason Throop, UCLA Department of AnthropologyProfessor Richard Lesure, Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Endowed Chair in Mesoamerican Archaeology

Pizza Talk: "Interlaced Scrolls and Feathered Banners: Markers of Culture in Teotihuacan (or, Whose Marcador is it, Anyway?)"
2017-10-18 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Matthew Robb, Chief Curator, Fowler Museum, UCLAIn 1963, the chance discovery at the Teotihuacan compound known today as La Ventilla of a four-part composite sculpture marked with interlaced-scrolls more typically associated with sites like El Tajín firmly established connections between ancient Teotihuacan and its contemporaries on the Gulf Coast. The discovery of a smaller, intact object of similar form in 1987 in Tikal’s Mundo Perdido provided new evidence for Teotihuacan’s involvement with Tikal and the Maya. Other studies focused on similar objects appearing in the visual culture of Classic period Veracruz have identified them as stone versions of feathered banners, and drawn connections with the appearance at Teotihuacan of interlaced-scrolls on murals at other buildings at La Ventilla and early structures at the Edificios Superpuestos. This lecture will document the chronological and cultural discrepancies between framing an object as a marker of Teotihuacan influence at 4th century Tikal, but as a marker of 6th century Gulf Coast connections at Teotihuacan. It will explore the archaeological, aesthetic, and social contexts of these objects and suggest new avenues for their interpretation based on recent discoveries at the site.

Software Carpentry: R Workshop
2017-10-16 09:00 - 2017-10-17 17:00
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper “Best Practices for Scientific Computing”.Software Carpentry: R WorkshopWho: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don’t need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.Where: Young Research Library. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.When: Oct 16-17, 2017. Add to your Google Calendar.Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (see here). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry’s Code of Conduct.Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organisers have checked that:The room is wheelchair / scooter accessible.Accessible restrooms are available.Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.Contact: Please email lib_archivehelp@em.ucla.edu for more information.

Friday Seminar: "New Perspectives on Ancient Trade"
2017-10-13 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Norman Yoffee, University of MichiganOld Assyrian texts from Mesopotamia, ca. 1950-1750 BCE, shed light on merchants and markets in Mesopotamia and the relationship between merchants and the Old Assyrian state. In this lecture, I review recent research on Old Assyrian trade and the implications for understanding trade in other times and places in the Ancient Near East and elsewhere. I also consider why there is a recent explosion of studies on trade by archaeologists and provide brief examples.

Pizza Talk: "Digital Buddhism: 3D Modeling and Photogrammetry in the Study of Chinese Buddhist Architecture"
2017-10-11 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Di Luo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Global Asia, New York University ShanghaiBuddhist architecture in China since the 11th century has often featured miniature pagodas and pavilions in the interior. These downsized “buildings,” appearing in ceiling domes and murals and sometimes functioning as altars, bookcases, and reliquaries, assumed the role of the “holy of holies” of the space. My study of these miniatures focuses on the scaling principles they adhered to, the woodworking tradition they epitomized, and the religious significance of the phenomenon of miniature-making. The downscaling procedure, I argue, was not a purely technological problem, but deeply rooted in the Buddhist view of the composition and formation of our world. This Buddhist ideal was best demonstrated by a hierarchical set of numerals found in miniature architecture. With the assistance of digital tools, we are able to expose and scrutinize the fascinating numerical relationships existed in Buddhist architecture.

Pizza Talk: "Disability and Age in Ancient Greece: A Case Study"
2017-10-04 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Debby Sneed, PhD Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAIn this talk, Debby will use literary and archaeological evidence to argue that ancient Greeks notonly tolerated the birth of deformed and disabled infants, but also expressed optimism about their futures and actively attempted to accommodate their needs. Modern studies tend to resolve this issue quickly, relying heavily on references by Plutarch, Aristotle, and Plato. These authors’ statements about the fate of deformed infants, however, bear no easy or straightforward relationship with the reality of the ancient world. If we situate these authors and their works within their appropriate contexts, we recognize that their presentations of infant exposure and infanticide are prescriptive, not descriptive. By expanding our analysis to the Hippocratic physicians, as well as to other works within the Aristotelian corpus, we find a wide range of evaluations of infants born with congenital deformities. What is more, the production of feeding bottles from the Late Bronze Age through the Roman period also demonstrates active efforts to accommodate infants (and sometimes children and adults) who were premature, weak, ill, or presented severe orofacial deformities such as cleft palate. Finally, an argument from absence: bioarchaeologists have produced no positive proof for the killing of deformed infants from any population in Greece. Taken together, the evidence demonstrates that the exposure of deformed and disabled infants was far from the rule in ancient Greece

Cuisine and cooking at the crossroads of civilization: new discoveries from Iraqi Kurdistan
2017-10-03 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 October 3, 2017 with Alan Farahani, Post Doctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA. 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.

Hidden Jewels, Forbidden Paths: Secrets of Rome and Turin
2017-06-20 12:00 - 2017-07-01 12:00
June 20 – July 1, 2017On this trip, Director’s Council members saw behind the scenes of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Itlay—the second largest collection of Egyptian antiquities (after Cairo)—and explored Rome with the experts!Download the brochure here.

Pizza Talk: "Rediscovering Masis Blur: A Neolithic Settlement in the Ararat Plain, Armenia"
2017-06-07 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Ph.D. Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLAThis talk is a summary of field research conducted by Cotsen/UCLA doctoral student Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky at Masis Blur, Armenia, over the course of three seasons from 2012-2014. Excavations at Masis Blur have unearthed Neolithic habitation layers (ca. 6200 – 5400 cal.BC) belonging to the Shulaveri-Shomutepe culture, with a rich material culture and several important new discoveries. Many questions have been raised concerning the origins and sudden appearance in the Southern Caucasus of sedentary communities having fully domesticated plants and animals. The abrupt abandonment of their settlements at the end of the Neolithic period is also still just as obscure. Certain cultural elements and fragments of imported pottery within otherwise Aceramic settlements attest to relations with societies in northern Mesopotamian area. This talk highlights findings from recent fieldwork at Masis Blur and discusses the new data within the framework of Neolithization processes in the Southern Caucasus.

Friday Seminar: "Keepers of Tradition, Harbingers of Change: Tracing Communities of Practice in Greco-Roman Karanis, Egypt"
2017-06-02 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Sonali Gupta-Agarwal, UCLA Traditions are transmitted through teaching and learning. The manner in which knowledge relating to craft production gets transmitted can help us in understanding the causes behind cultural continuity and change. By using an anthropological approach to find teaching and learning patterns, I investigate the role of potters inmodern day pottery workshops of Egypt and India in the transmission of knowledge relating to pottery production. Employing video footage using a video annotation research tool, I discern subtle gestures and postures of potters engaged in the process of pottery production and statistically examine these to reveal patterns specific to each workshop. I transpose the method and understanding gained from the study of modern potters to the archaeological context in Karanis, Egypt. Teaching and learning of pottery making leaves recognizable markers on the vessel that can be traced metrically. My research suggests that one can trace ancient communities of practice, knowledge transfer and interpret continuity or change in material culture as part of an ongoing learning tradition.

Pizza Talk: "The Shimmer of Bodies: Aztec Luxury in Context"
2017-05-31 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Associate Professor, Art History, Southwestern UniversityTaking a critical perspective, I argue that Aztec “luxury” objects worn or held on the body linked valor and value to tonalli, the heat-life energy that manifests personality and fate, and yollotl, the heart, source of blood and center of human life. The Aztecs explored the equivalences and differences between luxury materials–lapidary, gold, feather–through synesthetic metaphors that tied visual art to Nahuatl poetry. Forms made of these materials further emphasize these essential connections between person and object, which allowed the object to become a surrogate of the owner’s agency. This is important to consider in the Aztec economy of sacrifice and the logic of state of control.

The Inka Khipu: Communicating with Strings, Knots and Colors in Ancient Peru
2017-05-30 16:30 - 18:30

Homes and Habitat: A Mini-Symposium on Greco-Roman Architecture
2017-05-30 11:00 - 13:00

[CANCELLED] Friday Seminar: "Blood Weddings: the Inkas, the Habsburgs, and Royal Incest"
2017-05-26 16:00 - 18:00
NOTE: This Friday Seminar has been cancelled. Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Mumford, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Brown UniversityIn 1558, in Spanish Peru, the Inka princess Cusi Huarcay married her brother, Sayri Thupa, with the blessing of the Catholic bishop of Cuzco, carrying the Inka tradition of sibling marriage into the colonial era. In 1570, King Philip V of Spain married his niece Anna of Austria, the daughter of his cousin and his sister. Each marriage reflected a royal practice of close-kin marriage forbidden to ordinary people, in Peru just as in Europe. Scholars have never seen them as comparable: on the one hand, the apparent magical thinking of the Inkas, who believed kings were descended from the Sun and should not pollute their blood with outsiders; on the other the apparent pragmatism of European monarchs, for whom endogamy was a tool in geopolitical strategy. In fact, there was pragmatism behind the magic and magic behind the pragmatism. In both kingdoms, close-kin marriage was a way that kings and queens sacralized themselves through breaking the most intimate and dangerous of laws. This research project, juxtaposing these two traditions of power and sexuality, opens a window into how entangled states create a shared political culture under colonialism.

Pizza Talk: "3-D Digital Model of the Egyptian Fortress at Jaffa"
2017-05-24 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Jeremy Williams, Ph.D. Candidate, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLAThe practice of digitally modelling archaeological sites has grown more and more common in recent years. Well-known ancient sites such as the Temple of Karnak, Khirbet Qumran, and the Roman Forum have benefited from such models.The recent digital model of the Late Bronze Egyptian fortress at Jaffa has provided various insights that deepen our understanding of the function and design of this site.This presentation will demonstrate the process of modelling the fortress, focusing on important aspects of the reconstruction and the modelling itself . It will also include some brief demonstrations of the software used to create the digital model in order to show the accessibility and benefits of such models.

Friday Seminar: "Taboo topics: Exploring absences in the faunal remains from Çatalhöyük, Turkey"
2017-05-19 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Nerissa Russell, Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell UniversityEthnography shows us that every society has some form of food taboos, often focused on the meat of particular animals. While the pig taboo, in particular, has received considerable archaeological attention in the eastern Mediterranean, there is little discussion of taboo in prehistory. The obvious reason is that, lacking textual or direct ethnohistorical evidence, it is difficult to study absence. However, taboos are likely to have affected the composition of most zooarchaeological assemblages, so we cannot afford to ignore them. While specific beliefs cannot be applied from ethnography to deep prehistory, some of the structuring principles seen in ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistoric studies can help us to identify prehistoric animal taboos. I argue that the patterning of the animal bone assemblage from Neolithic Çatalhöyük has been shaped by taboo practices. These taboos involve multiple taxa and take several forms.

Pizza Talk: "An American Icon in Plastic: The Technical Analysis, Study, and Treatment of a First Edition 1959 Barbie"
2017-05-17 12:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Morgan Burgess and Marci Burton, M.A. Students, Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, UCLAThis study focuses on a privately owned, autographed, first edition (c. 1959) BarbieTM doll made from poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) plastic. Contrary to “sticky-leg syndrome”, where plasticizer migrates from the PVC and deposits to the surface as a tacky liquid, this doll exhibits a bloom of a fugitive, waxy, white solid on the legs from the mid-thighs to the ankles. In addition, the doll was autographed by Ruth Handler, the designer of BarbieTM and a cofounder of the Mattel corporation. Her signature and the date are now barely legible as the once sharp lines of ink have migrated within the PVC plastic.Multi-spectral imaging and x-radiography were performed on the doll in order to non-invasively, non-destructively examine the plastic and gain an understanding of the manufacturing procedures. In addition, with collaboration from the Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) of the Smithsonian, computed tomography, Fourier transform Infrared spectroscopy, and Raman spectroscopy data were collected on the plastic components of the BarbieTM doll. The results collected from the analysis provided insight into the process of manufacture, material composition and structural integrity of the doll, as well as determined the agents of degradation and identified the waxy bloom compound observed locally on both PVC plastic legs, but absent on other plastic components of the doll. After the removal of the waxy bloom, the (c.1959) BarbieTM, along with her clothing, accessories and case, was housed with archival materials and kept in a monitored environment to slow the degradation process and prevent another waxy bloom outbreak on the PVC plastic.

Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Open House
2017-05-13 12:00 - 16:00
ConnectionsArchaeology is a collaborative field and archaeological teams always consist of specialists from many disciplines. This interconnectedness is an integral part of a holistic understanding of our past. Join us for an open house that illuminates the relationship between the Fowler Museum and archaeological research, beginning with two gallery talks in the Fowler Museum. These talks will be followed by a lecture, Connections Ancient and Modern: Reflections on Fieldwork in India by Dr. Monica L. Smith and will include a panel discussion with the audience. After the discussion the archaeological labs will be open to the public, giving visitors the chance to explore how archaeologists work together on many different levels to contribute to our appreciation of cultural heritage through interdisciplinary, cutting edge research.For information call 310-209-8934. No reservation required.
