Pizza Talk

Speaker: Dr. Chin-hsin Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cal State University, Northridge

A specialized craft industry in prehistory is often studied from perspectives such as social organization, labor and product distribution, and exchange network. While these angles indeed provide significant insight to the past, the biological impact of craft production on community members is a critical component offering a nuanced view on people’s lifeways.

Speaker: Dr. James Snead, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cal State University, Northridge

In 1913 Elizabeth Deuel, a student of archaeology and resident of Los Angeles, wrote a letter to a friend describing a situation that modern readers can only interpret as sexual harassment. Coded with the discretion of the age, her brief account nonetheless resonates to modern readers conscious of the complex history of this topic in the field of archaeology.

Speaker: Dr. Joseph (Seppi) Lehner, Assistant Professor, Department of Archaeology, University of Sydney

Speaker: Gazmend Elezi, Ph.D. Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

The large amount of ceramic sherds in archaeological contexts and the variety of ceramic wares, shapes and dimensions during the Late Neolithic period in the Balkans is an indication that pottery was involved in many social activities. As such, it is among the best proxies to understand the daily life of Neolithic communities.

Speakers: Dr. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati & Dr. Giorgio Buccellati, UCLA

During the last seven years when war has raged in Syria, foreign archaeological projects have come to an almost total standstill. But then, the question arises: what were the presuppositions that, instead of allowing archaeology to disappear or, worse, to be kidnapped by a violent iconoclastic fundamentalism, could have given archaeology an impetus in fostering stronger group identity precisely at a moment of crisis?

Speaker: Dr. Jade d'Alpoim Guedes, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC San Diego

Research on agriculture's spread in East Asia has followed an underlying assumption: that farming produced equally reliable returns across the vast expanse of territories into which it spread and always placed farmers at a demographic advantage. Significant ecological barriers to growing crops on the Tibetan Plateau meant that the opposite was true.

Speaker: Dr. Kenneth Seligson, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, USC

Burnt lime was one of the most significant materials in the daily lives of the Prehispanic Maya, and yet archaeologists have uncovered relatively little evidence of production methods or locales prior to the Spanish Conquest. This talk presents the investigation of a series of pit-kilns in and around the Prehispanic site of Kiuic in the Puuc Region of the northern Maya Lowlands and highlights the multiple lines of evidence that identify these structures as lime production features.

Speaker: Dr. Sarah Beckmann, Visiting Lecturer, Department of Classics, UCLA

Over the last generation, scholarly attention towards the production of sculpture in the late antique period (ca. 250 – 550 CE) has rekindled interest in the villa of Chiragan (Haute-Garonne, Aquitaine). Since its excavation in the 19th century, Chiragan has been heralded for its statuary collection, which remains the largest extant assemblage of marble sculptures securely associated with a private context.

Speaker: Adam DiBattista, PhD Candidate, The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

The early Iron Age was a time of profound social change in Greece in which new ideas about materials like bone and ivory develop. At the same time, textual and iconographic evidence speaks to the importance of animals and animal sacrifice in the Greek world. As the remnants of living animals, objects made from tooth or bone carry special potential for the creation and negotiation of meaning.

Speaker: Dr. John Papadopoulos, Professor, Department of Classics, UCLA

The final season of fieldwork on the Ancient Methone Archaeological Project—a collaboration of Greek Ministry of Culture and UCLA under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens—was concluded in the summer of 2017. This presentation is an overview of our fieldwork at the site during the 2014-2017 seasons, and incorporates earlier fieldwork by our Greek colleagues beginning in 2003.