This talk will present the first outcomes of the ongoing joint research project between POLITO and UCLA.
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.
The practice of digitally modelling archaeological sites has grown more and more common in recent years.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.