Pizza Talk

Speaker: Dr. Matthew Robb, Chief Curator, Fowler Museum, UCLA

Speaker: Dr. Di Luo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Global Asia, New York University Shanghai

Buddhist architecture in China since the 11th century has often featured miniature pagodas and pavilions in the interior. These downsized "buildings," appearing in ceiling domes and murals and sometimes functioning as altars, bookcases, and reliquaries, assumed the role of the "holy of holies" of the space.

Speaker: Debby Sneed, PhD Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

In this talk, Debby will use literary and archaeological evidence to argue that ancient Greeks not

Speaker: Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky, Ph.D. Candidate, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

This talk is a summary of field research conducted by Cotsen/UCLA doctoral student Kristine Martirosyan-Olshansky at Masis Blur, Armenia, over the course of three seasons from 2012-2014. Excavations at Masis Blur have unearthed Neolithic habitation layers (ca. 6200 – 5400 cal.BC) belonging to the Shulaveri-Shomutepe culture, with a rich material culture and several important new discoveries.

Speakers: Morgan Burgess and Marci Burton, M.A. Students, Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, UCLA

This study focuses on a privately owned, autographed, first edition (c. 1959) BarbieTM doll made from poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) plastic. Contrary to “sticky-leg syndrome”, where plasticizer migrates from the PVC and deposits to the surface as a tacky liquid, this doll exhibits a bloom of a fugitive, waxy, white solid on the legs from the mid-thighs to the ankles.

Speakers: Noemi Mafrici and Michela Mezzano, Ph.D. Candidates, Architecture and Landscape Heritage, Politecnico di Torino

This talk will present the first outcomes of the ongoing joint research project between POLITO and UCLA.

Speaker: Dr. Annelou van Gijn, Professor of Archaeological Material Culture and Artefact Studies, Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University

Speaker: Dr. Patrick Hajovsky, Associate Professor, Art History, Southwestern University

Taking a critical perspective, I argue that Aztec "luxury" objects worn or held on the body linked valor and value to tonalli, the heat-life energy that manifests personality and fate, and yollotl, the heart, source of blood and center of human life. The Aztecs explored the equivalences and differences between luxury materials--lapidary, gold, feather--through synesthetic metaphors that tied visual art to Nahuatl poetry.

Speaker: Jeremy Williams, Ph.D. Candidate, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA

The practice of digitally modelling archaeological sites has grown more and more common in recent years.

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.