Gold Diggers and the “Keep It” Chant: UCLA in Ethiopia

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 […]

Friday Seminar: “Seals and Social Interaction at Kültepe in the Early 2nd Millennium BCE

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 […]

Pizza Talk: “Egyptian Coffins and Sarcophagi in the San Diego Museum of Man: Some Technical Studies”

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, […]

Friday Seminar: “After the Dodo, Archaeology in Colonial Mauritius: Problems and Prospects”

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 […]

Recycling the Materiality of Death

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 Workshop

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 […]

Pizza Talk: “New Answers from Old Seeds: Two Years of Research into Ancient Agriculture at the Cotsen Institute”

Speaker: Dr. Alan Farahani, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyThis talk is a summary of the research conducted by Postdoctoral Scholar Alan Farahani at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology over the past two years. His research has been focused on the long-term social and environmental consequences of agricultural production throughout the world using the […]

Pizza Talk: “Herders, Farmers, and Wildlife: Exploring Impacts of Early Food Production in Kenya”

Speaker: Dr. Anneke Janzen, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologySpecialized pastoralism emerged in Kenya around 3000 years ago and has adapted with changes in the social and ecological landscape to this day. My dissertation work used stable isotope analysis to explore the mobility and herd management strategies of early pastoralists in south-central Kenya 3000 to […]

UNESCO and the 1960’s Nubian Campaign: Initial Phase of a 3D Model of the Nubian Landscape

Speakers: Rosa Tamborrino and Paolo Piumatti, Politecnico di TorinoOur visiting scholars from the Politecnico di Torino, will outline the first steps in a new UCLA-Polito collaboration.The first International large scale UNESCO campaign for preserving world cultural heritage was provoked by a looming catastrophe: the loss of the Nubian Temples under the Nile flood due to […]

LaTeX: A Document Preparation System Workshop

LaTeX is a document preparation system that uses plain rather than formatted text, which encourages users to focus on content rather than formatting. This system is increasingly used for preparation of articles and theses, and has wide application across the sciences and humanities. This workshop will focus on the strengths of the LaTeX system in […]