Speaker: Dr. Richard Lesure, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyLesure will report on the work of a team of archaeologists from the UCLA Anthropology Department and Cotsen Institute of Archaeology who are trying to understand the demographic impact of the transition to agriculture at a continental scale. The area of interest is Greater Middle America, roughly from southern Utah (USA) […]

Speakers: Dr. James Snead, California State University, Northridge; Austin Ringelstein, National Park ServiceArchaeologists working within they landscape paradigm have increasingly begun directing attention toward the subject of movement. Recent  work has underlined the centrality of "motion" to the human experience, creating a body of  theoretical and empirical literature that has wide application. This presentation will discuss […]

Recent archaeological discoveries have begun to challenge the prevailing view of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200-900 BCE) as an era of cultural devolution and ethnic strife, or a ‘Dark Age’, in the eastern Mediterranean, as depicted in the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible. This illustrated talk will highlight the exciting discoveries of the […]

Speaker: Deidre Whitmore, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyThe Digital Archaeology Lab (DAL) aims to support the technological needs of the Cotsen faculty, students and staff by providing facilities, advice, and training. This talk will provide an overview of the facilities including the equipment that is available and how to access it (both in-person and remotely), and […]

Speaker: Dr. Willeke WendrichUCLA’s Shire Archaeological Project works in the north of Ethiopia, in an area where perhaps Ethiopia’s most ancient town once stood. The site is badly destroyed because of modern gold diggers who pan the soil for tiny flecks of gold. In November and December 2016 our archaeological research went hand-in-hand with community […]

Speaker: Dr. Agnete Lassen, Associate Curator, Yale University Babylonian CollectionFocusing primarily on seals, this talk will investigate the formations and transformations of social identity in cultural encounters, using the Assyrian merchant colonies in Anatolia as a case. Almost seventy seasons of archaeological excavations at the site of Kültepe in Central Anatolia have revealed the remarkable remains of […]

Speaker: David Scott, Professor, UCLA Department of Art History and UCLA/Getty Conservation ProgramThe San Diego Museum of Man has a collection of Saite and Ptolemaic coffins and mummies which were the subject of a technical study from 2007-2009.  Pigments, binding media, grounds, wood and degradation products were characterized by x-ray diffraction analyses, x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, […]

Speaker: Dr. Geoffrey Summers, Research Associate, University of Chicago Oriental InstituteMauritius, a small island nation in the Western Indian Ocean, was uninhabited until the arrival of the Dutch in the 16th century. After the Dutch left it was ruled first by the French and then by the British until independence in 1968. The ethnically and culturally diverse population is […]

Willeke Wendrich, Director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, cordially invites Friends of Archaeology members to a special dinner on January 31, 2017 with Professor Kara Cooney, Egyptian Art and Architecture, UCLA. The reception will begin at 6:00pm and be followed by dinner at 6:45pm. For millennia, wealthy ancient Egyptians relied on materialist productions […]

Photogrammetry, or Structure-from-Motion, is a technique for constructing three dimensional models from a series of photographs. This technique can be utilized by archaeologists to record objects, features, and sites both quickly and relatively inexpensively. In this workshop, you'll learn how to systematically photograph objects and the steps to processing these photographs into a 3D model […]