3:00pm -- Panel Discussion on Critical Archaeological Gaming with Chris Johanson, Demetri Terzopoulos, Eddo Stern, and Lisa Snyder
4:00pm -- Reception
5:00pm -- David Fredrick Lecture: Data Games: Cognitive Mapping in Ancient Pompeii
The archaic form of state society evolved independently at least six times in prehistory – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica, and coastal Peru – and marks a turning point that was fundamental to the creation of modern society. New research suggests another, much more recent, example of the formation of archaic states occurred in the Hawaiian Islands.
The Mekong Basin that Angkorian Khmers inhabited was a watery world. Annual monsoon rains dictated their farming and shaped their mobility, and short-term droughts that followed each year’s rainy season drove Khmers to dig household ponds and temple reservoirs. Chinese, Khmer and Cham histories include a Khmer origin story in which a foreign ruler conquers and marries a local serpent princess, and the bride’s father drains the local waters to create farmland for his daughter’s new dynasty.
The archaeology of human activity in space has been conceptualized since the 1990’s. Early work included definition of the parameters of the field, identification of subject material and sites, development of methodologies, and integration of common terrestrial archaeology activities such as cultural resource management and heritage protection into space archaeology.
What happens when people attempt to discard and destroy a museum archive that contains many thousands of visual and material objects? In this workshop, we discuss the politics, potential, and violence of archive objects (specifically a cache of over 1200, 35-mm transparencies from the mid-late 20th century. What lives do they live? Are they passive and neutral objects resting peacefully in an institution's collection? Are they active material things?
Old 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.
In 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.
In 2016, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) acquired over 2100 square km of data over the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, representing the largest single LiDAR acquisition for archaeological research. Sponsored by PACUNAM, a consortium of scholars representing different archaeological projects and nationalities have come together to analyze broad trends across the ten individual polygons covered by the data.
This 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.
Recent investigations in Waka’s primary civic-ceremonial structure discovered a royal tomb including the remains of Queen K’abel.