Pizza Talk

Pizza Talk: "Trying to Do the Right Things to Protect the World's Archaeological Heritage: A Committee Member's Tale"

Speaker: Dr. Lothar von Falkenhausen, Professor of Art History, UCLA

The Presidential Cultural Property Advisory Committee is charged with implementing the 1970 UNESCO convention in order to curb the illegal inflow of cultural property into the United States.  Lothar von Falkenhausen has served on this Committee since 2012.  He will report on the legal framework under which the Committee does its work, as well as on his experiences so far.

Pizza Talk: "Building Futures, Saving Pasts: An Examination of the Approach of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative"

Speaker: Dr. Paul Burtenshaw, Director, Projects, Sustainable Preservation Initiative

The Sustainable Preservation  Initiative (SPI) attempts to "Build Futures and Save Pasts"-simultaneously protecting tangible cultural heritage and enhancing the lives of the people who live around it.

Pizza Talk: "Community Archaeology--1984"

Speakers: Dr. Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, Visiting Professor, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology; Giorgio Buccellati, Professor Emeritus, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA

"These forty years now I've been speaking in prose without knowing it!" Unlike Moliere 's Monsieur Jourdain, we knew we were "speaking prose" ... Our "prose" was community archaeology, which we undertook to implement since the beginning of our excavation projects in Syria.

Pizza Talk: "Archaeology, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island"

Speaker: Dr. René Vellanoweth, Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, California State University, Los Angeles

In 1835, as part of broader efforts to missionize California Indians, the native people of San Nicolas Island were removed and sent to live on the mainland. This essentially marked the end of a 10,000-year history of native occupation and sealed the fate of all Nicoleño on the island except for one person who lived alone for 18 years.

Pizza Talk: "Roads of Social Responsibility: The Stone Paths of Yap, Micronesia"

Speakers: Dr. James Snead, California State University, Northridge; Austin Ringelstein, National Park Service

Archaeologists 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.

Pizza Talk: "The Arts of Memory: Anthropology of a Mental Artifact"

Speaker: Dr. Carlo Severi, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, EHESS, Paris

For linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists, the emblematic image always and everywhere preceded the appearance of the sign. This myth of a figurative language composed by icons, that form the opposite figure of writing, has deeply influenced Western tradition. In my talk, I show that the logic of Native American Indian mnemonics (pictographs, khipus) cannot be understood from the ethnocentric question of the comparison with writing, but requires a truly comparative anthropology.

Pizza Talk: "Production, Distribution, and Use of the First Pottery from the Tropics of Panama"

Speaker: Dr. Fumie Iizuka, University of Arizona

Monagrillo (ca. 4500-3200 14C BP) is the earliest ceramic of Central America. It is found in Central Panama in shell-bearing middens of the Pacific coast, rockshelters of the Pacific plains, foothills, and the cordilleras, and the Caribbean slopes. People had been farming for thousands of years when they adopted pottery. Population was significantly increasing.