Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Photogrammetry Workshop
2017-02-01 10:30 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
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 with Agisoft’s PhotoScan.The workshop will be led by Anthony Caldwell, the Scholarly Innovation Lab Manager. Anthony has collaborated with Cotsen faculty on projects digitally reconstructing architectural features and their built environments including a pair of Yoruba house posts and the historic theatres in Downtown Los Angeles.This workshop is open to Cotsen affiliates and their colleagues.

Recycling the Materiality of Death
2017-01-31 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 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 like coffins to encapsulate their funerary beliefs in the transformation of the dead. But how did Egyptians determined to equip themselves materially for the transformation into the afterlife respond and adapt in a brutal time of political, economic, and social collapse? This lecture will examine the evidence for coffin reuse within the context of the 20th and 21st Dynasties. This event is restricted to Friends of Archaeology. For more information about becoming a Friend, please visit our membership page.

Friday Seminar: "After the Dodo, Archaeology in Colonial Mauritius: Problems and Prospects"
2017-01-27 16:00 - 18:00
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 descended from slaves, indentured labourers, traders and colonial planters. Archaeology and anthropology are relatively new disciplines. This talk presents an overview of potentials, prospects, and new results of archaeological research in the Key and the Star of the Indian Ocean.

Pizza Talk: "Egyptian Coffins and Sarcophagi in the San Diego Museum of Man: Some Technical Studies"
2017-01-25 12:00 - 13:00
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, polarized light microscopy, wood anatomy, gas chromatography mass spectrome try and Elisa, a synopsis of the results of the study will be presented with examples of specific coffins illustrated.

Friday Seminar: "Seals and Social Interaction at Kültepe in the Early 2nd Millennium BCE
2017-01-20 16:00 - 18:00
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 a thriving city consisting of an acropolis with temples and palatial structures, as well as a surrounding lower town with compact industrial and residential quarters with narrow winding streets, small squares and more than a hundred multi-storied houses; perhaps as many as 25,000 people lived in this multi-cultural metropolis. Life in Kültepe is colorfully evidenced by more than 20,000 cuneiform documents preserved in separate archives found in houses in the city’s lower town. They show that Assyrians, from far-away Assur in present day Northern Iraq, established themselves in merchant colonies to do business with the local elites. Some of these foreigners brought their families or married into the local population, and some even took up local crafts and agriculture. Central to the commercial practices of the time was the use of personal seals to verify economic and legal documents. This talk will focus on seals that were carved in Assur and in Anatolia at the time of the merchant colonies, and investigate how these seal styles interacted with each other, and with the Assyrians and Anatolians who used these seals.

Gold Diggers and the “Keep It” Chant: UCLA in Ethiopia
2017-01-19 18:00 - 20:00
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 outreach to explain why the ancient remains are important, which resulted in many new friends and a new catchy chant.

Pizza Talk: "Introducing the CIoA Digital Archaeology Lab"
2017-01-18 12:00 - 13:00
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 the consulting services offered by the lab manager. The topics and dates for the first workshops and training sessions will be announced and the audience will have a chance to request additional topics. For more information about the DAL visit www.ioa.ucla.edu/labs/dal.

Sea Peoples and Neo-Hittites in the ‘Land of Palistin’: Recent Discoveries at Tayinat on the Orontes
2017-01-12 16:00 - 17:30
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 University of Toronto’s ongoing excavations at ancient Tayinat.TIMOTHY HARRISON(University of Toronto)Cosponsored by theUCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages & CulturesUCLA Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyPlease send RSVPs to cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu.

Pizza Talk: "Roads of Social Responsibility: The Stone Paths of Yap, Micronesia"
2017-01-11 12:00 - 13:00
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 new fieldwork on Yap, in the Eastern Caroline islands of Micronesia. Famous among anthropologists for “stone money” (or rai), the remarkable built environment of Yap also includes hundreds of kilometers of stone paths. Documentation of these features, including physical mapping as well as the collection of ethnographic information, is being conducted in collaboration with the Historic Preservation Department of Yap State. More than mere routes of convenience, the paths have been called “roads of social responsibility” and are fundamental organizational elements of Yapese society. Their study, supported by the Cotsen Institute, provides a distinctive case study for landscape archaeology.

Pizza Talk: "Early Farming Expansions in Mesoamerica and beyond: Macroregional Analysis and Continental Synthesis"
2016-11-30 12:00 - 13:00
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) to the Panama Canal. We build on recent studies of the Agricultural Demographic Transition (or ADT) and on efforts to trace expansions by early farmers on scales approaching the continental. Our argument in this paper is that the ADT in Middle America was long and bumpy, involving at least two eras of very rapid population growth. In much of Middle America, those periods of highgrowth can be identified as the demographic effects of, in succession, an Early-Maize Formative and a Maize-Staple Formative. The Early-Maize Formative tended to lead to localized population concentrations (including villages of more than 10 ha) within a larger landscape still sparsely populated. Well attested radial expansions of farmers from agricultural heartlands are instead a recurring feature of the Maize-Staple Formative; their spatial extents prove to be significantly smaller than continental. We suggest that, in Middle America, analysis at a macroregional scale of 10-40,000 km² is crucial in the effort to understand continental-scale patterns in the transition to agriculture.

Friday Seminar: "About-Faces in the Anthropology of Material Culture: Implementing Mauss' Program At Last"
2016-11-18 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Pierre Lemmonier, Centre National de Rechereche ScientifiqueTechnologie culturelle designates the strain in the anthropology of objects and techniques first developed in France in the early 1970s. This approach gives a prominent place to the physical actions of people making and doing things, to the way things are made and physically used, and to technological processes. This talk deals with contemporary methods and results in the field.After a series of trials, errors, and dead-ends – notably the difficulty of combining Leroi-Gourhan’s methodological propositions with Marxism and structuralism – technologues, and later scholars in “material culture studies” have produced hundreds of useful and remarkable studies of the “effects” of objects and techniques on social life, and analysis of the “style-related” inscriptions in objects (in materials, form, decoration) of identity, power, gender, etc.For decades, however, when it came to materiality, scholar had simply no idea of the kind of material item – materials, gestures, actions on matter, mechanical principles, physical characteristics, etc. – that might “say” something about a social organization, sets of cultural practices, or representations. In other words, Mauss’ program on techniques: Why and how this way of making, producing, physically using things, here and now? The question of what people do with objects, including “merely” building or reinforcing social relations through the use of artefacts, was left aside.Recently, a series of scholars showed that some objects, their physical properties, and their material implementation are wordless expressions of fundamental aspects of a way of living and thinking. Those objects and practices are even sometimes the only means of rendering visible pillars of social order that are otherwise blurred, if not hidden. Mauss’ program is at last implemented. But those studies also deal with a very general issue in anthropology: that of understanding the specific ways in which the spheres of our social existence, that we scholars arbitrarily compartmentalize, interact.It has now been shown how particular objects, in their very materiality and physical use, help the members of a society perceive and share the life they live collectively; how they conceive their unique world of rules and unspoken social givens, their unique system of ideas and ways of doing things, their unique material world, as well as how they conceive itsjustifications. Among other such objects, the talk will focus on Ankave mortuary drums and ceremonies.

[CANCELLED] Pizza Talk: "Egyptian Coffins and Sarcophagi in the San Diego Museum of Man: Some Technical Studies"
2016-11-16 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. David Scott, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyDue to unforeseen circumstances, this Pizza Talk has been cancelled. We will work to reschedule it in the new year.

Pizza Talk: "An Early Bronze Age Metallurgical Center at the Central Aegean Coast of Anatolia: New Results from Çukuriçi Höyük, Turkey
2016-11-09 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Barbara Horejs, Director of the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of SciencesThe excavations of Çukuriçi Höyük at the Aegean coast of Turkey revealed intensive metallurgical activities dating to the Early Bronze Age I period in early 3rd millennium BC. Beyond a high number of metal artefacts, the complete chaîne opératoire of metal production can also be reconstructed based on raw materials, slags, crucibles, a variety of tools and half-finished products. These finds and metallurgical remains have been analysed by using various analytical methods to describe the “geochemical fingerprint” of the metals used, mainly arsenical copper. The data will be discussed in relation to the known copper ore deposits in Turkey and the Aegean in order to identify the provenance of the metals. The second focus of this paper is set on the intensity of metal production at Çukuriçi Höyük and its further socio-cultural interpretation. The evidence of around 50 metal workshops embedded within several settlement districts give clear hints for the impact of this specialized production to the local community. Further archaeological indicators like faunal remains and textile technology will be discussed in relation to the potential division of labour, specialization and off-site activities, supported by aspects of spatial analyses of Çukuriçi Höyük settlements IV and III (2900–2750 calBC). Fig.: Visualization of the EBA 1 settlement at Çukuriçi Höyük based on excavation results and geophysical surveys (©ERC Prehistoric Anatolia/7 reasons).

Friday Seminar: "Bunking with the 24th Infantry: The Material Lives of Black Soldiers at Fort Davis, Texas, 1867-1878"
2016-11-04 16:00
Speaker: Dr. Laurie Wilkie, UC BerkeleyWhile the black regulars (otherwise known as Buffalo Soldiers) have been a compelling subject in popular culture, scholarly study into the lives of the African American men who chose to serve in the frontier military has been comparatively sporadic and unsustained. This is particularly true in the field of archaeology, where the complexities of preservation and resource management, and associations with US imperialistic policy, have made this soldier demographic an under-explored part of African Diaspora Archaeology. In this talk, I will discuss the unique challenges of military site archaeology, introduce archaeological research undertaken at Fort Davis, Texas, a post where each of the black infantry and cavalry units cycled through during the period of 1867-1885. Focusing on materials associated with the 1869-1875 period of occupation, I will talk about the ways that men of the post navigated a racially fraught landscape while creating a space for new constructions of black manhood in national discourses on citizenship rights, manliness and manifest destiny.

Pizza Talk: "The Last Paintings of Antiquity: Panel Paintings from Roman Egypt at the Getty Villa"
2016-11-02 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Mary Louise Hart, Getty MuseumThe last several years have seen extensive research and conservation of the Getty Villa’s collection of Romano-Egyptian panel paintings, which contain a good collection of mummy portraits dating from around AD 50 to about AD 220, the in situ portrait of a red-shroud mummy, and a “group” of Isis and Serapis flanking a square portrait of a mortal man (above). Recently this group – cataloged as a triptych by the museum upon its acquisition in 1974 – underwent an analytical update [published in “A Portrait of a Bearded Man Flanked by Isis and Serapis” published in Icon, Cult and Context (Cotsen, 2016), 79-89]. Past analytical work focused on understanding the materials and authenticity of the panels but had not presented new information about their ancient context or function. More recent organic analysis has revealed a number of different components assuring the ancient integrity and commonality of the panels but has also uncovered evidence of modern restoration in need of clarification. The complex story of origin, restoration, conservation and display inspired the organization of an international exhibition of Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits, shrouds, and associated artifacts (including mummies) for the Getty Villa in the fall of 2019.

Friday Seminar: "The Climatic Contexts of Trans-Himalayan Population Movements: 3000-1500 Years Ago"
2016-10-28 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Mark Aldenderfer, UC MercedFrom where and when did people first move into and live permanently the High Himalayas? What role did climate change have in the early peopling of the High Himalayas and in subsequent population movements? These questions are explored in three regions of Nepal: Upper Mustang, the Khumbu, and the Rasuwa valley. Archaeological, paleoclimatic, ethnographic, and historical data are combined to provide a comparative assessment of how the inhabitants of these regions coped with climate variability. Insights derived from this research have relevance to the challenges faced by these peoples today in a context of accelerated global warming.Mark Aldenderfer is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses the comparative analysis of high altitude cultural and biological adaptations from an archaeological perspective. He has worked on the three high elevation plateaus of the planet—Ethiopian, Andean, and Tibetan—over the course of his career and currently works in the High Himalayas of Nepal. He has edited or written more than 10 books, including Montane Foragers (1998), and has published numerous articles and book chapters in journals including Science,PNAS, Journal of Archaeological Science, Latin American Antiquity, and others. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. He is the editor ofCurrent Anthropology, is an associate editor for anthropology of Science Advances, co-edited Latin American Antiquity, and serves on a number of editorial boards.Co-sponsored with: Program on Central Asia, Anthropology, Geography,

Pizza Talk: "The Vatican Coffin Project: An International team Project"
2016-10-26 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Alessia Amenta, Vatican MuseumsThe Vatican Coffin Project gathers an international team of scholars who are divided into three groups with three different areas of expertise: Egyptology, Diagnostic and Conservation. The project has three objectives: the study of the construction and painting techniques of coffins, the identification of workshop patterns and the understanding of the ‘packaging’ of a coffin. Our work is also aimed at elaborating a protocol for the conservation of the artifacts. The last frontier is the study of paleography of the painted scenes and of the texts. Since new technologies applied to the study of ancient Egyptian coffins undergo constant improvement, this talk will provide an overview of the latest developments.

Chocolate Conquers the World
2016-10-25 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 on October 25, 2016 with Professor Janine Gasco, Cal. State Dominguez Hills. The reception will begin at 6:00pm and be followed by dinner at 6:45pm. Beginning with the earliest known evidence for cacao consumption almost 4000 years ago in Chiapas Mexico, to the growing demand for chocolate in China, India, and elsewhere, one trend has never changed: once you get a taste for chocolate you can never live without it. In this talk we follow the trail over 4000 years as ancient, and more recently, contemporary merchants peddle their chocolate, and people from around the world discover its many virtues.This event is restricted to Friends of Archaeology. For more information about becoming a Friend, please visit our membership page.

Agricultural Origins and the Rise of Complex Societies
2016-10-24 12:00 - 13:30
Speaker: Jared Diamond, UCLA Department of GeographyPart of the Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC) Speaker Series

[CANCELLED] Friday Seminar: "Urban Development in Gerasa (Jerash, Jordan) from the Roman to Early Islamic Period: New Results from the Danish-German Northwest Quarter Project"
2016-10-21 16:00 - 18:00
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this Friday Seminar has been CANCELLED.Speaker: Dr. Rubina Raja, Aarhus University, DenmarkSince 2011 a Danish-German team has been conducting archaeological fieldwork in ancient Gerasa, Jerash in the Northwest Quarter. The site was one of the famous Decapolis cities mentioned by Pliny and has a rich archaeological record. The large scale excavations of the 1920s and 30s as well as the UNESCO funded international project, Jerash Archaeological Project, which was initiated in the 1980s, are the two largest archaeological undertakings at the site. These projects all focussed on the monumental parts of the city centre. The Danish-German Northwest Quarter Project has taken another approach and has investigated the 4 highest laying hectares within the walled city situated west of the Artemision on a steep hill. This talk will present some of the results from these investigations and show how our understanding of the urban development at the site is improved by looking beyond the main street and its representative monuments.

Iron Age Archaeology in Thailand: A View from Recent Research in Central Thailand
2016-10-20 11:00 - 12:30
Speaker: Thanik Lertcharnrit, Department of Archaeology, Silpakorn UniversityAn event sponsored by the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Pizza Talk: "Material Interactions: UCLA at the Museo Egizio, Turin"
2016-10-19 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Willeke Wendrich, Director of the Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyUCLA has started a close collaboration with the Museo Egizio in Turin, which holds the most important collection of material culture from ancient Egypt after the museum in Cairo. This pizza talk will highlight the research that has been started in the summer of 2016.

Friday Seminar: "Fabrics of Power among the Classic Maya: The Politics of Commodities Networks"
2016-10-14 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Dorie Reents-Budet, Boston Museum of Fine ArtsThis talk employs distributional patterns of pottery, determined by archaeology, ceramic typology, artistic style and nuclear chemistry, to discern Classic Period (250-850 CE) economic interaction spheres among the Maya. The research points to the crucial role played by cotton production in the political economy of the Maya and throughout ancient Mesoamerica, the ceramic distributional patterns coinciding with configurations of alliance noted in other archaeological data.

Cotsen Prize Ceremony and Reception
2016-10-13 18:00 - 20:00
Speakers: Dr. Jane Buikstra, Dr. Gordon RakitaDr. Gordon Rakita will be delivering a lecture titled “Vignettes of a Mentor: A Bioarchaeological Lineage”Dr. Jane Buikstra will then deliver a lecture titled “Ancient Tuberculosis in the Americas: A Career-Long Quest”

Pizza Talk: "Food for the Dead: Organic Material from Ancient Egyptian Funerary Contexts"
2016-10-12 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Caroline Cartwright, Department of Scientific Research, The British MuseumDr Caroline Cartwright is the Senior Scientist and Wood Anatomist in the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum. Her primary areas of scientific expertise cover the identification and interpretation of organics such as wood, charcoal, fibres, macro plant remains, shell, ivory and bone from all areas and time periods in the British Museum’s collections, including for CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). She has led many teams of archaeobotanists, archaeozoologists and human osteologists on archaeological projects in various parts of the world including the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe. Reconstructing past environments, charting vegetation and climate changes, and investigating bioarchaeological evidence from sites and data, all form an important part of her research. Prior to joining the British Museum, Caroline was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Friday Seminar: "Using Non-Invasive Chemical Analysis with Mobile Instruments to Understand Artists' Motivation in Antiquity"
2016-10-07 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Philippe Walter, Sorbonne Universités, Université Pierre et Marie CurieThe precious character of the Cultural Heritage artifacts and their uniqueness imply particular cautions and require instruments, which may give the maximum of information directly on the objects, in-situ in the museums or in the archaeological sites. The implementation of new analytical tools, including mobile instruments, allows a deep insight on the archaeological and artistic materials. We will show the performances of different new mobile instruments (X-ray fluorescence and X-ray diffraction) we built recently in the laboratory to allow in situ characterization of materials, for instance on prehistoric rock art paintings in France or marble sculptures from Greece (Delphi) and Tunisia (Bardo National Museum), alteration products and modes of preparation of different pigments. XRF imaging – in which the surface of an object is scanned with a focussed X-ray beam to obtain elemental distribution images – and hyperspectral imaging can reveal significant new information on the antique polychromy.

Pizza Talk: "Hubei Road Trip: A Tour of Sites and Museums in Central China"
2016-10-05 12:00 - 13:00
Speakers: Richard Ehrich, PhD Candidate, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyDr. Hans Barnard, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyIn June 2016, Cotsen affiliates Hans Barnard and Richard Ehrich briefly visited a number of archaeological sites and museums in Wuhan, Jingzhou, Xiangyang and Suizhou in the Hubei Province in Central China. Richard is a graduate student who lived in Wuhan to conduct research for his dissertation. He will provide some background information on the sites and collections that they were able to see. He will also give a bit of insight into how it was like doing research in this region. Hans is an archaeologist who has worked in different regions of the world, but this was his first trip to China. He will discuss his first impressions of archaeological practices in China as an informed outsider.

Pizza Talk: "Reclaiming Heritage: Community and Indigenous Archaeology in Ifugao, Philippines"
2016-09-28 12:00 - 13:00
Speaker: Dr. Stephen Acabado, Cotsen Institute of ArchaeologyRecent trends in the practice of archaeology have seen the emergence of the active involvement of descendant communities in the research process. This is an important development since the relationship of archaeologists and communities that they work with has been tenuous, particularly, when archaeological findings have the potential to contest ethnic identities. As a case in point, the findings of the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP) (Ifugao, Philippines) force the rethinking of history and question the bases of Ifugao identity, particularly on how they have been presented in Philippine historical narratives. Ifugao identity is based on wet-rice production and the historical narrative that the Spanish never conquered them. Previously, the dating of the inception of the Ifugao rice terraces was placed at 2,000-3,000 years ago. The findings of the IAP however, suggest a later inception of the terraces, which coincided with the arrival of the Spanish in the northern Philippines. Initially, this finding did not sit well the larger Ifugao descendant communities, but as experience exemplifies, the pursuit to actively involve the communities and stakeholders in the research process resolved this issue. We further argue that the inclusion of the voices of different stakeholders in the interpretation of the past is inadequate since it denotes that indigenous stakeholders are simply contributors to, and not codevelopers or co-investigators of, research projects. Doing so empowers indigenous stakeholders to take control of their heritage.

Pizza Talk: "Soto: 2,300 Years of Evolving Ritual Architecture and Practice at a Monumental Paracas Huaca"
2016-06-03 16:00 - 17:00
Speaker: Ben Nigra, PhD Candidate, UCLA’Paracas’ refers to a polychromatic fine-ware tradition, a canon of architectural elements, a set of specific mortuary practices, and a rich textile tradition associated with Peru’s southern coast during the first millennium BCE. Despite decades of research dedicated to Paracas ‘art’, craft goods and iconography, south coast archaeologists struggle to understand the basic sociopolitical character of Paracas and the social and material conditions that drove its development through time. Excavations at Huaca Soto (2014-2015) re-calibrate this narrative by examining the evolution of monumental ceremonial architecture in the Chincha Valley. Our investigation further suggests that Paracas platform mounds became widely recognized as huacas, or sacred spaces, that garnered attention from later Wari, Chincha and Inca groups. Huaca Soto thus provides a case study on the appearance and evolution of coastal monuments in the long-term – spanning the first millennium BCE to today.

Friday Seminar: " 'Mycenae, Rich in Silver': Silver, Gold, and Maritime Trade in the Early Mycenaean World"
2016-05-27 16:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr. Jorrit Kelder, University of OxfordThis presentation aims to provide an overview of the earliest contacts between the Greek (Mycenaean) world and Egypt, between ca. 1600 BC and 1100 BC. By highlighting a number of objects that have been found in Egypt and the Aegean, this paper proposes that the earliest contacts between these two regions may have started in the context of long-distance trade in precious metals (with silver coming from the Aegean, and gold exported from Egypt). From the 14th century BC onwards, these early trading encounters developed into a much closer, ‘special relationship’, which involved the exchange of goods, plants, and possibly mercenaries.
