Event: Pizza Talk: "Ceramics from Mai Adrasha, Ethiopia: A First Look at the Western Highlands"

Speaker: Rachel Moy, PhD Candidate, UCLA

This talk will summarize the preliminary results of the first season of excavation and research of the UCLA Shire Project at the site of Mai Adrasha in the northwestern Ethiopian highlands. I will discuss how Mai Adrasha fits into what we know of a larger pre-Aksumite to Early Aksumite cultural and political context. Due to how few excavated sites date to these periods, research needs to start with basic descriptions before we can make any firm broader conclusions. My dissertation will focus on the ceramic data from Mai Adrasha. I plan to start with the raw data to create four typologies each with a different method. I will then compare the four typologies taking into account the strengths and weakness of each. From these results, I will develop a more robust method to describe the ceramic data, and from this base, we can begin to describe more broadly the site of Mai Adrasha, its surroundings, and its broader cultural and political context.