Pizza Talk

Speaker: Dr. Barbara Horejs, Director of the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences

The excavations of Çukuriçi Höyük at the Aegean coast of Turkey revealed intensive metallurgical activities dating to the Early Bronze Age I period in early 3rd millennium BC. Beyond a high number of metal artefacts, the complete chaîne opératoire of metal production can also be reconstructed based on raw materials, slags, crucibles, a variety of tools and half-finished products.

Speaker: Dr. David Scott, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this Pizza Talk has been cancelled. We will work to reschedule it in the new year.

Speaker: Ben Nigra, PhD Candidate, UCLA

'Paracas’ refers to a polychromatic fine-ware tradition, a canon of architectural elements, a set of specific mortuary practices, and a rich textile tradition associated with Peru's southern coast during the first millennium BCE. Despite decades of research dedicated to Paracas 'art', craft goods and iconography, south coast archaeologists struggle to understand the basic sociopolitical character of Paracas and the social and material conditions that drove its development through time.

Speaker: Rachel Moy, PhD Candidate, UCLA

Speaker: Dr. Marriana Nikolaidou, UCLA

Speaker: Merrick Posnansky, UCLA Professor Emeritus

Black Lives Matter has been a contentious political and Social concern in recent years but most of the heat has concerned the present situation of Police violence on Black youth in the USA. My own concern is with the general decrease of interest in the lives of poorly documented Blacks before the 1960's. Archaeology has been the key for understanding much of the nature of the transplantation and acculturation of Africans in the New World.

Speaker: Scott Fitzpatrick, University of Oregon

Speaker: Jacob Bongers, PhD Candidate, UCLA

This talk addresses local mortuary practices in the mid-Chincha Valley, Peru dating from the Late Intermediate Period, or LIP (AD 1000 – 1476) to the Late Horizon (AD 1476 – 1532). Ethnohistorical documents state that a complex, centralized state known as the Chincha Kingdom dominated the Chincha Valley from the LIP until the Late Horizon, when the Inca conquered and consolidated the Chincha. Here, we summarize mortuary data from three years of fieldwork (2013-2015) in the mid-Chincha Valley.

Speaker: Marilyn Kelly Buccellati, UCLA

2010 was our last excavating season in the ancient city of Urkesh in the northeastern corner of Syria although we went to the site in December 2011 to meet with the local staff to assure continuing their work on conservation and site presentation. With the impossibility of excavating at Urkesh during the war, and in view of the affinities between the third millennium at Urkesh and the Kura-Araxes culture I decided to actively return to my early interests in the southern Caucasus and join an excavation in the Republic of Georgia.

Speaker: James Brady, Cal State University, Los Angeles